Reverie in Darkness
It's easy to feel puzzled by Jennifer Crane’s opaque photographs. Her experiments with antiquated technologies explore historical gaps and lapses in the archival record.
Jennifer Crane, "Untitled,” from the series "Outlaw," 2015
archival pigment print from wet-plate collodion original, 22" x 17"
They look, well, old. Not as in done before, ho-hum, with that awkward odour of failed originality, but as actual remnants from the past. Jennifer Crane's fragile portraits and other offerings could be mistaken, certainly, for found images or archival scraps. Oddly familiar, yet unidentifiable, they provide eerie material echoes of photography’s early days, giving visual form to French literary theorist Roland Barthes’ take on the medium as “a certain but fugitive testimony.”
Collectively, the images seem to trade in the language of documentation. But their opacity – they are variously blurred, faded, cloudy, washed out or overly dark – actually frustrate any expectation that the photographic record should elucidate and preserve, whether personal memories or historic events. At best, with their weathered markings and technical failings, they evoke a curious nebula of vague associations. And, for Crane, that’s absolutely fine.
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Jennifer Crane, "Untitled,” from the series "Outlaw," 2015
archival pigment print from wet-plate collodion original, 30" x 24"
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Jennifer Crane, "Untitled,” from the series "Outlaw," 2015
archival pigment print from wet-plate collodion original, 30" x 24"
“As a photographer, I don’t use my camera to document something,” she says. “I’m more influenced by the staged image, questioning how a photograph reads and drawing that out in a playful way for the viewer.”
Crane, a professor at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, is fascinated by photography technologies pioneered in the 1800s, things like tintypes and collodion wet plates. It must have seemed a sort of alchemy, or a fateful magic, watching in darkness as those first blurry images emerged. It’s hard to recapture such excitement amidst today's instantaneous exchange of digital selfies. But Crane gives it her best try in Reverie in Darkness, on view at The Gallery / Art Placement in Saskatoon until June 21.
Jennifer Crane, "Untitled,” from the series "Dear Edward," 2012
archival pigment print from pinhole camera original, 22" x 17"
The show brings together work from three recent series created with various blends of contemporary and antiquated processes. Outlaw (and other failed portraits) refers to the utilitarian photography of the Wild West “wanted” posters as well as conventions of portrait photography. Dear Edward is her conversation with Edward Weston, the American master of modernist black-and-white photography, a series she shot, with some irony, using a pinhole camera. Her final series, Specter, is the most disembodied, going back to an early conception of photography as drawing with light. Here, she went into the darkroom and played with a flashlight, creating small ghostlike images, really nothing more than patches of fuzzy light and darkness, printed at the size of a Victorian calling card.
Jennifer Crane, “Specter,” 2018
unique silver gelatin archival print, 4” x 3”
There’s a backhoe-load of theoretical ideas around photography, which seems to offer a version of reality, but is itself implicit in shaping both memory and the past, just as the saying goes, the victors write their version of history. Crane mentions family albums – which intrigue and frustrate in equal measure. They offer glimpses of our antecedents, but as we all know, the gaps and slippages create mysteries. Sometimes such photos allow us to construct memories of events we never witnessed. Representation is endlessly problematic. So are our memories.
Crane sometimes photographs herself, as in the Outlaw series, creating intentional flaws by doing things like moving during the long poses required by early cameras. It allows her to disrupt the representational process, signalling the failures inherent in any mediated past. It also lets her to engage various art-world functions – from creation to reception and preservation – role playing, in essence, in an obscure narrative of her own design.
“In photographing myself, I like that play where I am the subject in front of the lens,” she says. “I’m also the photographer behind the camera. I am the archivist that gathers this impossible archive, this fictional archive of photos. And I’m also the collector of these objects. So I like that possibility of creating the fictional space that exists in the photo and playing with that in creating a series of images, or the fictional archive of photographs.” ■
Reverie in Darkness is on view at The Gallery / Art Placement in Saskatoon from May 12 to June 21, 2018.
the Gallery / art placement
238 3 Ave S, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7K 1L9
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