Collections: Birds Bones and Butterflies
Fotografii de Leah Sobsey Contribuţii de John Fitzpatrick, Xandra Edenen Limba Engleză Hardback – 11 iul 2016
Leah Sobsey works at the intersection of nineteenth century photographic processes and twenty-first century digital technology. Sobsey photographs bird skins, bleached bones, clipped ferns, and tattered shoes that she unearths from the dark drawers of national park museum collections. Plucked from their original context, she illuminates them with sun and light, giving them new definition. The subject matter of each series she creates is dictated by her discoveries, bridging past to present, honoring both the specimens she works with and the medium of photography.Her project is particularly timely during this centennial year of national parks service, and as museum collections are in a current state of crisis due to diminishing funding and support. Her focus on the parks is a way of preserving these fragile specimens that represent American history. This body of work sheds light on the importance and significance of the collections and their impact on science, history, the humanities and the hundreds of thousands of visitors who leave their footprints on our national parks.
Leah Sobsey is an artist and educator. Her combined art and anthropology background shaped her love of stories and gave her the tools to artfully map and investigate her own history and now others. Sobsey primarily works in 19th century photographic processes intertwined with digital technology. She received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and a BA in Anthropology and Sociology from Guilford College. She has exhibited nationally in galleries, museums and public spaces, and her work is held in private and public collections across the country. She has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute and the Maine Photographic Workshops, and currently teaches at the Center for Documentary studies at Duke University and is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Sobsey is the co-founder of the Visual History Collaborative and one of the core artists in Bull City Summer, a collaborative documentary project that explores the Durham Bulls AAA baseball team. Bull City Summer, the book, published by Daylight Books was released in 2014 and is one of their top sellers. Sobsey’s images have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review Daily, Slate.com and many more.
Xandra Eden is Executive Director & Chief Curator of DiverseWorks in Houston. She was previously Curator of Exhibitions for the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC. Since 2003, she has organized over 60 exhibitions of work by national and international contemporary artists. Recent major exhibitions include Zones of Contention: After the Green Line (2015); Nancy Rubins: Drawing, Sculpture, Studies (2014); and Diana Al-Hadid (2013). Eden held positions at the The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York, and Women & Their Work Gallery, Austin. She received her BFA from SUNY Purchase and MA from CCS at Bard College.
Dr. John Fitzpatrick is a native of St. Paul, Minnesota, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1974, and received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1978. Since 1995 he has been Director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University. Previously (1988-1995), he was Executive Director of Archbold Biological Station, a private ecological research foundation in central Florida. From 1978 to 1989 he was Curator of Birds and Chairman of the Department of Zoology at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. He is a Fellow of the American Ornithologists' Union, served as its President (2000-2002), and in 1985 received its highest research honor (Brewster Award) for his co-authored book Florida Scrub-Jay: Ecology and Demography of a Cooperative Breeding Bird.
Leah Sobsey is an artist and educator. Her combined art and anthropology background shaped her love of stories and gave her the tools to artfully map and investigate her own history and now others. Sobsey primarily works in 19th century photographic processes intertwined with digital technology. She received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and a BA in Anthropology and Sociology from Guilford College. She has exhibited nationally in galleries, museums and public spaces, and her work is held in private and public collections across the country. She has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute and the Maine Photographic Workshops, and currently teaches at the Center for Documentary studies at Duke University and is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Sobsey is the co-founder of the Visual History Collaborative and one of the core artists in Bull City Summer, a collaborative documentary project that explores the Durham Bulls AAA baseball team. Bull City Summer, the book, published by Daylight Books was released in 2014 and is one of their top sellers. Sobsey’s images have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review Daily, Slate.com and many more.
Xandra Eden is Executive Director & Chief Curator of DiverseWorks in Houston. She was previously Curator of Exhibitions for the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC. Since 2003, she has organized over 60 exhibitions of work by national and international contemporary artists. Recent major exhibitions include Zones of Contention: After the Green Line (2015); Nancy Rubins: Drawing, Sculpture, Studies (2014); and Diana Al-Hadid (2013). Eden held positions at the The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York, and Women & Their Work Gallery, Austin. She received her BFA from SUNY Purchase and MA from CCS at Bard College.
Dr. John Fitzpatrick is a native of St. Paul, Minnesota, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1974, and received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1978. Since 1995 he has been Director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University. Previously (1988-1995), he was Executive Director of Archbold Biological Station, a private ecological research foundation in central Florida. From 1978 to 1989 he was Curator of Birds and Chairman of the Department of Zoology at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. He is a Fellow of the American Ornithologists' Union, served as its President (2000-2002), and in 1985 received its highest research honor (Brewster Award) for his co-authored book Florida Scrub-Jay: Ecology and Demography of a Cooperative Breeding Bird.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781942084174
ISBN-10: 194208417X
Pagini: 128
Ilustrații: 80 color photos
Dimensiuni: 254 x 254 mm
Greutate: 1.04 kg
Editura: Daylight Books
Colecția Daylight Books
ISBN-10: 194208417X
Pagini: 128
Ilustrații: 80 color photos
Dimensiuni: 254 x 254 mm
Greutate: 1.04 kg
Editura: Daylight Books
Colecția Daylight Books
Extras
Introduction by Leah Sobsey
My uncle opened the wooden drawers of Chicago’s Field Museum collection—floor-to-ceiling drawers, in my childhood memory. And there were birds. Thousands and thousands of birds—vertical, in endless rows. Bird speciimens from across the world. It was beautiful and it was jarring. And it left an indelible imprint.
In the years since, childhood recollections intermingle with my adult understanding and interpretation of that moment. Someone had taken the time to find, catalogue, name, tag, and carefully lay out these magnificent creatures, now silent, in pristine rows, sealed up in drawers like little coffins.
Fast-forward over two and a half decades. I’m sitting in my kitchen and hear a thud against the window. I peer outside and see a beautiful, lifeless, Tufted Titmouse on my deck. My first instinct is to hold it; my second is to photograph it. It triggers memories of the Field Museum, and so I begin my quest to photograph and somehow memorialize specimens.
I started at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, where I was granted permission to handle and photograph some of the 10,000 bird skins in its collection.
In May 2008 I was awarded a residency at the Grand Canyon. I knew I didn’t have anything to add to landscape photography at the National Park, so I set out to work in the museum collection. Specimens of tiny birds, bleached bones, clipped ferns, and fragile butterflies housed in drawers of darkness. I had open access to these collections. Now, all these years later, in solitude, I could finally touch, rearrange, photograph, and memorialize these birds. Plucked from their context and illuminated by sun and light, they are brought to life once again.
The 100-year-old Verkamp family home, which now provides lodging and studio space for the park’s artists in residence, looks out directly over the canyon. The apartment had no darkroom, so I crawled through the living room window onto the rooftop, where the sun beat down with desert intensity. Inspired by Anna Atkins, the 19th-century botanist and photographer, I decided to create cyanotypes from my photographs. Almost every day for four weeks, one chatty raven perched nearby as witness while I worked. Standing at the edge of the canyon, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the landscape, it’s easy to miss the details. The museum collections allowed me to examine them. And so I became committed to this lifelong project of working with National Park Museums’ collections across the country, photographing birds, butterflies, nests, and even tattered shoes.
This project is particularly timely during this centennial year of the National Park Service, and as museum collections are presently in a state of crisis due to diminishing funding and support. My current focus on national parks is a way of preserving these fragile specimens that represent American history. This comes at a time when climate change and funding allocations threaten indigenous species and artifacts with extinction. This body of work sheds light on the collections and their impact on science, history, the humanities, and the hundreds of thousands of visitors—current and future—who leave their footprints on our national parks.
— Leah Sobsey
To Muse Is Divine by John Fitzpatrick
Leah Sobsey’s eclectic selection of artful images from museum collections provides a wonderfully dissonant intersection of how the once alive, the once fabricated, the once useful, the once worn, can catch our eye and hold our attention. Each design speaks to us about time as well as form. Whether on its own or examined side by side with others, each challenges us to study, to compare, to recall, perhaps to explain or simply to ponder and enjoy its perfections and flaws. We are invited to muse, and no privilege exists that is more human, nor more divine.
Darwin and Wallace demonstrated a century and a half ago what remains true to this day, that specimens provide the fundamental materials from which we draw insights about life on Earth and how it evolves. Every specimen in a natural history collection was once a living individual, or, in the case of a bird nest, was created by one. Each has a unique history and place of origin, and came to reside in its museum tray through a unique passage from collector to preparator to curator, sometimes transferring through dozens of homes through the decades. And so, by care- fully musing through a great natural history collection, we are connected, not just with the living organism, but back through different times, different people, and dif- ferent lands across the Earth. Much the same can be said of every other kind of specimen, whether it’s an old worn- out shoe, a tarnished silver spoon, or a rusty horseshoe. Each had a story, a free and purposeful life of its own, before achieving immortality by finding its way into the museum tray, where we are lucky enough to encounter it.
As an evolutionary biologist, curator in a great bird col- lection, and now director of an institute housing more than a million vertebrate specimens, I have had the privilege to use and cherish the world’s natural history collections. They are timeless wonders, yielding discov- eries and intrigue upon every visit. I do not see them as assemblages of dead things. Rather, I know them to be treasure troves of the living world, where every specimen invites us into its former life. Sobsey’s collection of spec- imens teaches us that no two individuals are the same. They provide us opportunities to scrutinize the range of shapes and colors and internal structures of nature, from the ordinary to the remarkable.
— John Fitzpatrick
The Average Life Made Extraordinary by Xandra Eden
From the poignant inertia of bird and butterfly speci- mens to the past life implied by a pair of worn-out old shoes, photographer Leah Sobsey brings the collections of natural history museums back into the contemporary conscious. Her ghostly images memorialize the archived remnants of something (or someone) once full of energy, and point to the obsessive care and curiosity of the sci- entists, conservators, and curators who purposefully allowed these things, though silenced and still, to live on for generations to study.
In choosing artifacts that imply movement, Sobsey’s images remind us of humanity’s relentless attempt to triumph over death. Museum collections, intervening in the transitory nature of life, place things in a state of stasis, removed from the constant ebb and flow. They provide organic artifacts a permanence and significance that is part science, part utopian fantasy. Normally stowed away—forgotten and out of the sight in storage units— these collected specimens, their lives suspended in time, are introduced to the light, literally, through Sobsey’s photography. Her imagery conveys a mixture of poetry and objectification peculiar to museums by distilling the essence of a thing while at the same time transforming our perception of it to color, light, and shadow.
Though Sobsey experiments with diverse photographic processes, she never abandons the camera altogether. Initially, she captures the light through the lens to create a photograph within the confines of the museum. Though quiet and contemplative, the images draw us in with their stark compositions and intense color and vibrancy, insisting upon closer examination. Her use of the cyanotype to create her images of butterfly and plant specimens takes the further step of requiring the artist to work outdoors. For this secondary process, she exposes transparencies of her photographs to sunlight to transfer the images onto cyanotype paper. In so doing, Sobsey reveals a desire to reintroduce the spec- imens into the natural landscape and give presence to whatever life they have left.
Birds, butterflies, indigenous grasses and wildflowers, and shoes...one might think that her selections express a sense of anxiety regarding death and remembrance. The images seem to affirm (to herself, to us) that meaning and emotion remain connected to the lives that these objects represent, and that museums offer us both return and a reminder of the past. Even more, they introduce us to a sense of care and curiosity about something we might otherwise never have known.
— Xandra Eden
My uncle opened the wooden drawers of Chicago’s Field Museum collection—floor-to-ceiling drawers, in my childhood memory. And there were birds. Thousands and thousands of birds—vertical, in endless rows. Bird speciimens from across the world. It was beautiful and it was jarring. And it left an indelible imprint.
In the years since, childhood recollections intermingle with my adult understanding and interpretation of that moment. Someone had taken the time to find, catalogue, name, tag, and carefully lay out these magnificent creatures, now silent, in pristine rows, sealed up in drawers like little coffins.
Fast-forward over two and a half decades. I’m sitting in my kitchen and hear a thud against the window. I peer outside and see a beautiful, lifeless, Tufted Titmouse on my deck. My first instinct is to hold it; my second is to photograph it. It triggers memories of the Field Museum, and so I begin my quest to photograph and somehow memorialize specimens.
I started at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, where I was granted permission to handle and photograph some of the 10,000 bird skins in its collection.
In May 2008 I was awarded a residency at the Grand Canyon. I knew I didn’t have anything to add to landscape photography at the National Park, so I set out to work in the museum collection. Specimens of tiny birds, bleached bones, clipped ferns, and fragile butterflies housed in drawers of darkness. I had open access to these collections. Now, all these years later, in solitude, I could finally touch, rearrange, photograph, and memorialize these birds. Plucked from their context and illuminated by sun and light, they are brought to life once again.
The 100-year-old Verkamp family home, which now provides lodging and studio space for the park’s artists in residence, looks out directly over the canyon. The apartment had no darkroom, so I crawled through the living room window onto the rooftop, where the sun beat down with desert intensity. Inspired by Anna Atkins, the 19th-century botanist and photographer, I decided to create cyanotypes from my photographs. Almost every day for four weeks, one chatty raven perched nearby as witness while I worked. Standing at the edge of the canyon, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the landscape, it’s easy to miss the details. The museum collections allowed me to examine them. And so I became committed to this lifelong project of working with National Park Museums’ collections across the country, photographing birds, butterflies, nests, and even tattered shoes.
This project is particularly timely during this centennial year of the National Park Service, and as museum collections are presently in a state of crisis due to diminishing funding and support. My current focus on national parks is a way of preserving these fragile specimens that represent American history. This comes at a time when climate change and funding allocations threaten indigenous species and artifacts with extinction. This body of work sheds light on the collections and their impact on science, history, the humanities, and the hundreds of thousands of visitors—current and future—who leave their footprints on our national parks.
— Leah Sobsey
To Muse Is Divine by John Fitzpatrick
Leah Sobsey’s eclectic selection of artful images from museum collections provides a wonderfully dissonant intersection of how the once alive, the once fabricated, the once useful, the once worn, can catch our eye and hold our attention. Each design speaks to us about time as well as form. Whether on its own or examined side by side with others, each challenges us to study, to compare, to recall, perhaps to explain or simply to ponder and enjoy its perfections and flaws. We are invited to muse, and no privilege exists that is more human, nor more divine.
Darwin and Wallace demonstrated a century and a half ago what remains true to this day, that specimens provide the fundamental materials from which we draw insights about life on Earth and how it evolves. Every specimen in a natural history collection was once a living individual, or, in the case of a bird nest, was created by one. Each has a unique history and place of origin, and came to reside in its museum tray through a unique passage from collector to preparator to curator, sometimes transferring through dozens of homes through the decades. And so, by care- fully musing through a great natural history collection, we are connected, not just with the living organism, but back through different times, different people, and dif- ferent lands across the Earth. Much the same can be said of every other kind of specimen, whether it’s an old worn- out shoe, a tarnished silver spoon, or a rusty horseshoe. Each had a story, a free and purposeful life of its own, before achieving immortality by finding its way into the museum tray, where we are lucky enough to encounter it.
As an evolutionary biologist, curator in a great bird col- lection, and now director of an institute housing more than a million vertebrate specimens, I have had the privilege to use and cherish the world’s natural history collections. They are timeless wonders, yielding discov- eries and intrigue upon every visit. I do not see them as assemblages of dead things. Rather, I know them to be treasure troves of the living world, where every specimen invites us into its former life. Sobsey’s collection of spec- imens teaches us that no two individuals are the same. They provide us opportunities to scrutinize the range of shapes and colors and internal structures of nature, from the ordinary to the remarkable.
— John Fitzpatrick
The Average Life Made Extraordinary by Xandra Eden
From the poignant inertia of bird and butterfly speci- mens to the past life implied by a pair of worn-out old shoes, photographer Leah Sobsey brings the collections of natural history museums back into the contemporary conscious. Her ghostly images memorialize the archived remnants of something (or someone) once full of energy, and point to the obsessive care and curiosity of the sci- entists, conservators, and curators who purposefully allowed these things, though silenced and still, to live on for generations to study.
In choosing artifacts that imply movement, Sobsey’s images remind us of humanity’s relentless attempt to triumph over death. Museum collections, intervening in the transitory nature of life, place things in a state of stasis, removed from the constant ebb and flow. They provide organic artifacts a permanence and significance that is part science, part utopian fantasy. Normally stowed away—forgotten and out of the sight in storage units— these collected specimens, their lives suspended in time, are introduced to the light, literally, through Sobsey’s photography. Her imagery conveys a mixture of poetry and objectification peculiar to museums by distilling the essence of a thing while at the same time transforming our perception of it to color, light, and shadow.
Though Sobsey experiments with diverse photographic processes, she never abandons the camera altogether. Initially, she captures the light through the lens to create a photograph within the confines of the museum. Though quiet and contemplative, the images draw us in with their stark compositions and intense color and vibrancy, insisting upon closer examination. Her use of the cyanotype to create her images of butterfly and plant specimens takes the further step of requiring the artist to work outdoors. For this secondary process, she exposes transparencies of her photographs to sunlight to transfer the images onto cyanotype paper. In so doing, Sobsey reveals a desire to reintroduce the spec- imens into the natural landscape and give presence to whatever life they have left.
Birds, butterflies, indigenous grasses and wildflowers, and shoes...one might think that her selections express a sense of anxiety regarding death and remembrance. The images seem to affirm (to herself, to us) that meaning and emotion remain connected to the lives that these objects represent, and that museums offer us both return and a reminder of the past. Even more, they introduce us to a sense of care and curiosity about something we might otherwise never have known.
— Xandra Eden