A recent trend in the serious art world has been an appreciation of the photographic output of ordinary people. Ever since the advent of the Kodak Brownie in the early 1900s the personal camera has been a prominent feature of American life. For a century now, the culture has been accumulating these images shot by regular people during the course of their everyday lives. These images of fleeting moments of time are generally kept as family treasures. But as people pass on and as families split up, more and more photo collections and photo albums end up in dump piles or in thrift shops. Some end up in the hands of people that have no connection to those in the photos.
It is now becoming popular to collect such photographs as a kind of folk art: images captured by the unpracticed eye of ordinary people showing their concerns and interests. They are important documents, too, of the material culture of past generations.
For a themed show, Jennifer Olson-Rudenko, curator of the Gallery at Tacoma Community College, asked artists to submit work based on found photos. The result is “Found Photographs,” TCC’s latest art show, that will be on display through March 20. The artists in the show used old photographs as fodder for collage, as compositional templates for works in various media and as an avenue for the veneration of ancestors. They use the people and places in found photographs as a way to imagine fictional scenarios. Old photographs of people who are reduced to a nameless face dressed in the style of another time can also function as memento mori, reminders of death. One contemplates these anonymous people who gaze back from the past via the magic of the camera lens. Their names and the story of their lives have faded away. As a viewer of these images, one is forced to realize that this is the ultimate fate of us all. We are as grass before a wind.
“Found Photographs” is thus a show haunted by a kind of melancholy. It is difficult to gaze at people parading before the camera in the prime of their lives and not realize that we are doing the same. Revel in your time and suck the sweetness out of living, because before long all that will remain are paper images, some lingering stories and maybe a continuation of the DNA.
Painters like David Roholt, Robert Koch, and Melinda Liebers Cox use photos as compositional guides. Roholt used an old photo of a fisherman as the basis for a lush image with the paint slathered on as thick as cake icing. Koch, meanwhile, buys found photos and uses them to paint loosey-goosey, cartoonish scenes that possess a joyful energy. Korean-American artist Patsy Surh O’Connell used photos of her parents’ arranged wedding as the starting point for a watercolor composition that pays homage to their lives. Fumiko Kimura did a similar treatment with old family photos.
Use of old photos as elements of collage is also a recurrent trend in the show. Andrea Erickson used a 1923 picture of her mother as a little girl and combined it with feathers and paper flowers and birds to create a happy, yet surreal, vignette. Colorful pompoms done with embroidery enliven Sharon Styer’s dark image of a scene around a swimming pool. Called, “And the days slip by so easily,” the image is quite striking.
The show includes many more artists than we have room for in this brief discussion. Get out and see the show for yourself. The opening reception is Jan. 14 from 4 to 6 p.m. For further information, visit http://www.tacomacc.edu/thegallery.