Coinciding with the exhibition opening, Virginia Heckert, head of the Getty Museum’s Department of Photographs and curator of the exhibition, sits down with three of the featured photographers—Marco Breuer, John Chiara, and Alison Rossiter—to discuss their work, their engagement with the essential elements of photography, and the challenges they present to our understanding of the medium.
Working since the early 1990s without a camera or film, Marco Breuer subjects black-and-white and color photographic papers to various acts of burning, abrading, or scraping to create nonrepresentational works that have the immediacy of abstract drawings. Loading oversized custom-built cameras with photographic paper rather than film negatives, John Chiara creates unique large-scale color prints that convey a hands-on aesthetic characterized by irregular edges and unevenly saturated colors. Since she started working with sheets of expired gelatin silver paper in 2007, Alison Rossiter uses ordinary darkroom techniques to bring to life found photograms and compositions that are uncannily reminiscent of landscapes or mid-twentieth-century painterly abstractions.
Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography or Back to the Basics?
Tuesday, April 14, 2015, 7pm
Harold M. Williams Auditorium, Getty Center
Admission is free, but a reservation is recommended. Reserve online or by calling (310) 440–7300.