Event 4: Getty Museum's Reinventing Photography: Light, Paper, Process

I have been to Getty Museum once before, and I never walked into the Photography exhibit located a little deeper on the premise. I had the choice of looking at the art history collection to find any mathematical sequencing that artists focused on in the past, or to take a look at something a little more modern. Thankfully, the current exhibit right now is Reinventing Photography, which was a great opportunity for me to learn about the different developments and inventions that are going on in this field.

I love taking photos, but I have never studied photography, so I only know the basics of good lighting and settings. The art that I saw today really opened by eyes to how far photography can really go -- it's not just a snapshot of a moment in time. It could be a series of photos taken in the most abnormal and creative ways. Most of these artists, I learned, are multimedia artist who use several different techniques to arrive at their masterpiece.

My favorite piece in this exhibit was Lisa Oppenheim's Lunagrams #1-13. She picked up glass plate negatives of the moon which were made way back in 1850 by astronomer, John Williams Draper. After creating an enlarged copy negatives, she exposed sheets of photographic paper to moonlight at the same phases of a lunar cycle depicted in the negatives. She then toned the prints with silver to capture the magical ethereal qualities that prints from the original negatives must have conveyed when first presented a century a half ago. She wanted to bring nostalgia to when the pioneers of Astronomy first made these discoveries. To create the glow effect of what it must have felt like -- both surreal and disbelief, yet optimistic with the limitless wonders of the World.

Another artist, Matthew Brandt, surprised me with how he utilitized the labor intensive heliograph process, where metal plates are coated with sticky tar like substance that gardens with exposure to sunlight. After photographing exhibits of prehistoric animals in the page museum, Brandt wanted to make large scale heliographs or sun picture in sheets of aluminum using tar gathered from nearby La Brea tar pits. It's interesting how he literally used parts of history (tar pits) to create a modernized piece. This conveys a sense of loss for creatures and buildings that no longer exist. He wanted to use the preserved the memories of fossilized skeletons and photographs to depict their void today. 

After this exhibit, I have developed a new love for photography. It's not as simple as what meets the eye. There are several ways to transform it and develop new technologies to "reinvent" photography. This medium has been around for a while, but with greater access to digital media now in this generation, it makes being a multimedia artist both fun and inventive.