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

"From the Background to the Foreground: The Photo Backdrop and Cultural Expression" is a traveling exhibition originating at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. The exhibition is made possible with generous support from Polaroid Corporation. Funding was also provided through a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. The Visual Studies Workshop Exhibitions Program is funded, in part, by grants from the New 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, New 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 venues and dates to be confirmed

INTRODUCTION

From the Background to the Foreground: The Photo Backdrop and Cultural Expression" includes photography backdrops of many types (hand-painted and quilted, itinerant and studio) as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century photographs and photo albums, contemporary and folk art, various objects and props, interactive installations, audio and video recordings, and texts produced and/or used in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. Historical and contemporary work by hundreds of artists and intellectuals - painters, itinerant photographers, studio photographers, amateur picturemakers, anthropologists, curators, historians - have been collected to raise questions about the creation, use and interpretation of photography's most pervasive form: the human portrait. Through the juxtaposition of diverse objects, as well as through written texts, 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 South 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 text provides a postmodern, anthropological point of view; Iglesias y Cabrera and Leon's text, written in the form of a composite fictional narrative, is based on interviews with Mexican itinerant photographers; Lippard's text concerns fantasy and cultural frames of reference; Neal's text reflects, in his words, "a non-scholarly or pedestrian writing style" that traces some of his experiences as a researcher, traveler, observer 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 on an expanse of cloth, generally of some heavy cotton weave or thin, pliable canvas, measuring approximately 8x10 feet. . . . Patrons sit or stand in front of them to have their pictures taken." Many of the backdrops in the exhibition depict historic figures, events and places, and as such, seem to be based on the Western notions of fidelity to time and space. In others, however, invented color, anachronistic references and fantastic scenes are represented along with mythical figures and events to evoke and preserve important cultural beliefs. In her essay "Frames of Mind," Lippard writes:

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

Since the advent of photography, photographers have posed their subjects with painted background scenes and artificial accessories or props. It is difficult to pinpoint when and where the practice of placing painted scenes behind the photographed subject first emerged, although the London daguerreotypist Antoine Claudet (1797-1867) patented painted backgrounds in December 1841. Claudet is widely acknowledged as one of the earliest photographers to utilize painted backgrounds and scenery. Most photographers of the daguerreotype era (roughly from 1839 through the mid-1850s), including those in the United States, made little use of painted representational backgrounds. Scenery and props mostly consisted of a plain background, table, chair and sometimes books. A rare example of a daguerreotype produced in the U.S. using a highly stylized painted background is on display in the exhibition. It was with the introduction of tintypes and card photographs in the 1860s that such accessories became common in commercial use. But perhaps the human desire to be photographed amidst painted scenes, props or constructed environments emerges less out of photography's technological evolution and more out 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 else. It is no wonder that many photo backdrops and studio props are expressions of mobility, ones variously symbolized by ships, trains, planes, automobiles, bicycles and even hot-air balloons.

Studio photographers active in the U.S. during the 1870s, such as Napolean Sarony, J. M. Mora and L. W. Seavey, all made extensive use of painted backdrops, theatrical sets and scenery. As Robert Taft writes in Photography and the American Scene:

To Seavey, in large measure, must go the credit, or the blame, for the introduction of the painted background. He rose to fame during the seventies, making a specialty of manufacturing accessories for the photographic gallery. We learn, from an account published in 1879, that "to L. W. Seavey undoubtedly belongs the honor of successfully introducing and making scenic background[s] an indispensable accompaniment to any well-equipped gallery. His grounds combine the color and touch that make him prominently without rival. To him also belongs the honor of making it possible to introduce into the photograph accessories of every description necessary to complete a composition of almost any character, by actually manufacturing the reality of a light and durable material, which admits of easy and safe transportation and long use without injury. His name is familiar to all; his reputation is not alone national, but world-wide.(2)

As indeed it was: Dr. Vogel, for instance, writing from Berlin, called Seavey "the first background painter of the world." Within the same text, Taft states:

A history of backgrounds in American photography is given by Paul Brown, Philadelphia Photographer, v. 16, p. 219 (1879). According to Brown, the painted background was introduced into this country by Henry Ulke, a German, in 1857. The commercial production of backgrounds was started by a Mr. Ashe for the Anthonys.(3)

The inconsistencies in Taft's history text are daunting. The point here is that I have yet to find any consistent, thorough account of the emergence and history of the photo backdrop in the U.S. - or anywhere for that matter. Moreover, the few references we do have inevitably focus on the commercial studio photographers mentioned above. Largely ignored, until this exhibition - except for a scant few publications, articles and individuals to whom I am indebted(4) - are non-Western studio photographers, itinerant photographers and artists. Their use of non-commercial backdrops is vital to a larger understanding of photographic and cultural history.

This exhibition also gives space to contemporary artists such as Laura Shurley, Kenn Yazzie and Melanie Yazzie, whose collaborative mixed-media installation "3 Little Indians" can be viewed as a critical response to the ways in which Native Americans have been and continue to be represented. John Pfahl, Bill Mattick and Linda Robbenolt's work variously responds to the codes of the photographic studio and artificial environments, as well as to many historical and cultural issues imbedded in the use of backdrops and props within photographic representation.

"From the Background to the Foreground" is designed to creatively address the worldwide phenomenon of photo backdrops and to examine its effects on understandings of photographic and cultural representation, as well as its influences on and immersion in contemporary art practice. Unlike a technical or scholarly history, this exhibition brings together diverse material and texts from around the world in a way that hopefully expresses the similarities as well as differences of an overwhelmingingly global phenomenon.

NOTES

1. For an insightful text concerning the concept of spectorial gaze, see Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Also, I am indebted to Paul Jeremias for sharing with me excerpts from his unpublished thesis, "The Theater and the Photograph: Observations and Parallels."

2. Robert Taft, Photography and the American Scene, (New York: Dover Publications, 1964), pp. 352-353. Seavey published several papers on backgrounds, including: "Backgrounds," in The Philadelphia Photographer (September 1880); "Backgrounds and Their Uses, Number II." in Western Photographic News, Vol. 2, no. 1 (July 1875).

3. Taft, p. 478.

4. Ann Parker and Avon Neal, Los Ambulantes: The Itinerant Photographers of Guatemala, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982). Stephen Sprague, "How I See the Yoruba See Themselves," Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication, Vol. 5, no. 1 (Fall 1978). Sonia Iglesias y Cabrera and Maria del Carmen Leon, "Recuerdos de un Fotografo Ambulante," !El que se mueve, no sale! Fotografos Ambulantes, (Mexico City: Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares, 1989). I am indebted to artist and collector George C. Berticevich for talking with me and showing me his fascinating work and collections.

JAMES B. WYMAN, coordinator of the Exhibitions Program at the Visual Studies Workshop since 1987, has organized numerous exhibitions, performances and installations of art and media-based work. He is a an adjunct faculty member at Visual Studies Workshop/SUNY College at Brockport and at the University of Rochester, where he teaches installation art and sculpture.