From The Background to the Foreground: The Photo Backdrop and Cultural Expression - photo exhibit

"From the Background to the Foreground: The Photo Backdrop and Cultural Expression" is a traveling exhibition originating at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, fresh York. The exhibition is made possible with generous support from Polaroid Corporation. Funding was also provided [i]or[/i] part of to the other a grant from the novel York State Council on the Arts. The Visual Studies Workshop Exhibitions Program is stocked in part, by grants from the of recent origin York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

From the Background to the Foreground: The Photo Backdrop and Cultural Expression

Visual Studies Workshop Rochester, novel York October 1, 1996-March 8 1997

Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy Andover, Massachusetts April 18-July 31 1997

California Museum of Photography Riverside, California Dates to be announced

Other venue and dates to be confirmed

INTRODUCTION

From the Background to the Foreground: The Photo Backdrop and Cultural Expression" includes photography backdrops of many emblems (hand-painted and quilted, itinerant and studio) as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century photographs and photo albums, contemporary and folk art, various things and props, interactive installations, audio and video recordings, and body s produced and/or used in Asia, Europe Africa and the Americas. Historical and contemporary work by dint of hundreds of artists and intellectuals - painters, itinerant photographers, studio photographers, amateur picturemakers, anthropologists, curators, historians - have been gathered to raise questions about the creation, use and interpretation of photography's greatest in quantity pervasive form: the human portrait. end the juxtaposition of diverse phenomenons as well as through written true copys the project attempts to explore the relationships among the fields of art, photography, folklore, ethnography and vernacular art.

The feature essayists include Arjun Appadurai, Professor of Anthropology and southern Asian Languages and Civilizations at The University of Chicago; Sonia Iglesias y Cabrera and Maria del Carmen Leon Curators at the Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares, Mexico City; Lucy Lippard, writer and activist; and Avon Neal, writer, artist and folk art collector. Appadurai's body provides a postmodern, anthropological point of view; Iglesias y Cabrera and Leon's body written in the form of a composite fictional narrative, is based upon interviews with Mexican itinerant photographers; Lippard's true copy concerns fantasy and cultural frames of reference; Neal's true copy reflects, in his words, "a non-scholarly or pedestrian writing style" that traces more [i]or[/i] less of his experiences as a researcher, traveler, looker-on and collector of folk art.

As Neal writes in "Folk Art Fantasies - Photographers' Backdrops," "[t]he typical photographic backdrop can best be described as an oversized painting upon an expanse of cloth, generally of more [i]or[/i] less heavy cotton weave or thin, pliable canvas, measuring approximately 8x10 feet . . Patrons sit or stand in forehead of them to have their pictures taken." Many of the backdrops in the exhibition depict historic figures, incidents and places, and as of that kind seem to be based upon the Western notions of fidelity to time and space. In others, however, invented color, anachronistic concerns and fantastic scenes are showed along with mythical figures and facts to evoke and preserve important cultural beliefs. In her essay "Frames of Mind," Lippard writes:

[t]he backdrop setting at hands a place in which the photograph's subdues occupy new, often inappropriate, 'realities.' The illusions are myriad, on the other hand have to do primarily with class, time and place, with being lifted on the outside of one economic reality into another, in a different historical or geographical 'picture.' Backdrops are greatest in quantity often idealized landscapes (urban or pastoral) or architecture (interior and exterior), emphasizing beauty, spirituality, elegance, exoticism, fortune or just an exhilarating and colorful fantasy Humor many times plays a role in the form of unlikely situations. .

Since the advent of photography, photographers have pos their make submissives with painted background scenes and artificial accessories or hold ups It is difficult to pinpoint when and where the practice of placing painted spectacles behind the photographed subject first emerg although the London daguerreotypist Antoine Claudet (1797-1867) patented painted backgrounds in December 1841 Claudet is widely acknowledged as single of the earliest photographers to utilize painted backgrounds and prospect Most photographers of the daguerreotype era (roughly from 1839 from one side the mid-1850s), including those in the United States, made little use of painted representational backgrounds. prospect and props mostly consisted of a plain background, table, chair and sometimes works A rare example of a daguerreotype produc in the U using a highly stylized painted background is upon display in the exhibition. It was with the introduction of tintypes and card photographs in the 1860 that like accessories became common in commercial use. on the other hand perhaps the human desire to be photographed amidst painted spectacles props or constructed environments rise s less out of photography's technological evolution and more on the outside of the theatrical, dioramic, panoramic and pedestrian-mall experiences of the nineteenth century(1) which can be considered a precursor to computer-age "virtual reality"; a fanciful means of being someone or somewhere other It is no wonder that many photo backdrops and studio shore ups are expressions of mobility, individuals variously symbolized by ships, trains, planes, automobiles, bicycles and plane hot-air balloons.