.
John Patrick Dugdale
John Patrick Dugdale
Narrative account of career
The birth of my interest in allegorical photographs began with my first camera, a gift from my mother in 1972. I created a tableau for my first picture: my sister stood under my grandmother’s grape arbor and acted like the Venus di Milo, which I’d seen on Bugs Bunny. My instinct at age 12 was to use the camera to make art rather than to record what was around me. The mystery of being able to recreate the world to suit my imagination and to express that vision through this small, mechanical devise was the deeply held secret of my childhood. It is a notion that persists throughout my life’s work.
As an undergraduate at the School of Visual Arts in NYC where I majored in art history and photography, I was asked to work on a book of flowers which I altered to resemble medieval illuminations. I had gone to school with every intention of being the next Alfred Stieglitz, but after the book was published I was surprised by a commercial career in photography that lasted a decade. I recommitted myself to fine art photography after my transformative experience of nearly total blindness due to HIV-related CMV retinitis.
My first instinct after my sight change was to share what I saw through my damaged eyes--spotted photographs and blurred figures--which was not satisfying for me
experienced a revelation when I realized that my actual, heartfelt sight was not damaged at all; my sight loss did not change my visual acuity. I was kept awake at night, thinking about the next photographs that would come from my mind and heart.
All of the images included in the portfolio I am submitting with this application were made since that time. During the last ten years, I’ve used my antique, large-format camera to create pictures using the 19th century processes of cyanotype, platinum and albumen. These photographs are directly related to the prose of the great American transcendentalists Emerson, Thoreau, Dickenson and Whitman who spoke to me by way of audiotape. Much of my work also reflects upon 19th century photographic tradition. Two of my heroes are William Henry Fox Talbot, the first photographer to walk the line between science and art, and Julia Margaret Cameron who created spirit-filled photographs of people in her innermost circle.
Shortly after the beginning of the loss of my sight, I discovered that one of the few times I could move beyond that loss is when I’m creating pictures. My visual impairment has helped me to focus on essentials. The content of my photographs includes family, friends, a few beloved objects, and self-portraits with allegorical references to illness and recovery.
I have been surprised, starting with the first of what would become almost 25 solo shows around the world, that viewers of my private feelings about my sight loss at age 33 cut across boundaries and spoke universally to the idea of transformation through loss.
I’ve had solo exhibitions in galleries across the United States, from Boston and New York, to Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Miami, Houston, Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago. My work has been included in group-shows at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, NY, the Miami Art Museum, and the New Orleans Museum of Art.
My photographs are included in the permanent collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, Alabana, the Miami Art Museum, and the Berkeley Art Museum at the University of California. Maurice Sendak has included my photographs in his private collection and, over a ten-year period, Sir Elton John has collected 199 of my prints.
Career highlights includes being inducted into the Royal Photographic Society in Bath, England, where my photographs are included in the public collection. Another was being allowed to take photographs on the William Henry Fox Talbot estate in Lacock, England, and having my photographs include in the collection of the museum there.
One decade and 78 shows later, I continue to be interested in delving into the miracle of light being fixed on paper sensitized with iron or silver salts. At a time when digital photography is taking over the medium, I want to continue to preserve the craftsman like aspect of photography, the hands-on artistry of exposing a piece of silver nitrate film to light traveling through a piece of ground glass, and making a contact print in the sun. I want to recapture the sensuality of experience in the origins of photography.
There is a silent quality to my photographs; the images exist as stilled time. The photograph itself becomes a sort of momento mori. I emphasize the sculptural, fragile quality of the photograph by creating box-like frames with hand-blown glass and 19th century wallpaper or hand-made, marbleized paper on the back.
The quietude that people respond to in my pictures is, in part, because of the way the pictures are made: no flash; no harsh electric light; not even the sound of the shutter—just a lens cap removed, and then gently replaced. This encounter provides, for me, a metaphor for looking. My visual impairment allows me to provide a meditation upon the experiences of vision: visual loss is, after all, a visual experience.
I find now that I love speaking about my experience and sharing it with the public. I spoke on the BBC and “Fresh Air with Terri Gross” on National Public Radio about what it is like to create photographs without having my full eyesight. I’ve lectured at the International Center of Photography in New York, and at the Berkeley Art Museum. This is what I want to share: I’ve realized that it is not through my eyes, but through my mind, that I see things. Looking involves sound, sight, touch, and memory. What does it mean to see? What is it like to look, or to be looked at? These are questions I will continue to explore in my photographs and in my life.
(Αναδημοσίευση από το site της Holden Luntz Gallery)
The birth of my interest in allegorical photographs began with my first camera, a gift from my mother in 1972. I created a tableau for my first picture: my sister stood under my grandmother’s grape arbor and acted like the Venus di Milo, which I’d seen on Bugs Bunny. My instinct at age 12 was to use the camera to make art rather than to record what was around me. The mystery of being able to recreate the world to suit my imagination and to express that vision through this small, mechanical devise was the deeply held secret of my childhood. It is a notion that persists throughout my life’s work.
As an undergraduate at the School of Visual Arts in NYC where I majored in art history and photography, I was asked to work on a book of flowers which I altered to resemble medieval illuminations. I had gone to school with every intention of being the next Alfred Stieglitz, but after the book was published I was surprised by a commercial career in photography that lasted a decade. I recommitted myself to fine art photography after my transformative experience of nearly total blindness due to HIV-related CMV retinitis.
My first instinct after my sight change was to share what I saw through my damaged eyes--spotted photographs and blurred figures--which was not satisfying for me
experienced a revelation when I realized that my actual, heartfelt sight was not damaged at all; my sight loss did not change my visual acuity. I was kept awake at night, thinking about the next photographs that would come from my mind and heart.
All of the images included in the portfolio I am submitting with this application were made since that time. During the last ten years, I’ve used my antique, large-format camera to create pictures using the 19th century processes of cyanotype, platinum and albumen. These photographs are directly related to the prose of the great American transcendentalists Emerson, Thoreau, Dickenson and Whitman who spoke to me by way of audiotape. Much of my work also reflects upon 19th century photographic tradition. Two of my heroes are William Henry Fox Talbot, the first photographer to walk the line between science and art, and Julia Margaret Cameron who created spirit-filled photographs of people in her innermost circle.
Shortly after the beginning of the loss of my sight, I discovered that one of the few times I could move beyond that loss is when I’m creating pictures. My visual impairment has helped me to focus on essentials. The content of my photographs includes family, friends, a few beloved objects, and self-portraits with allegorical references to illness and recovery.
I have been surprised, starting with the first of what would become almost 25 solo shows around the world, that viewers of my private feelings about my sight loss at age 33 cut across boundaries and spoke universally to the idea of transformation through loss.
I’ve had solo exhibitions in galleries across the United States, from Boston and New York, to Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Miami, Houston, Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago. My work has been included in group-shows at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, NY, the Miami Art Museum, and the New Orleans Museum of Art.
My photographs are included in the permanent collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, Alabana, the Miami Art Museum, and the Berkeley Art Museum at the University of California. Maurice Sendak has included my photographs in his private collection and, over a ten-year period, Sir Elton John has collected 199 of my prints.
Career highlights includes being inducted into the Royal Photographic Society in Bath, England, where my photographs are included in the public collection. Another was being allowed to take photographs on the William Henry Fox Talbot estate in Lacock, England, and having my photographs include in the collection of the museum there.
One decade and 78 shows later, I continue to be interested in delving into the miracle of light being fixed on paper sensitized with iron or silver salts. At a time when digital photography is taking over the medium, I want to continue to preserve the craftsman like aspect of photography, the hands-on artistry of exposing a piece of silver nitrate film to light traveling through a piece of ground glass, and making a contact print in the sun. I want to recapture the sensuality of experience in the origins of photography.
There is a silent quality to my photographs; the images exist as stilled time. The photograph itself becomes a sort of momento mori. I emphasize the sculptural, fragile quality of the photograph by creating box-like frames with hand-blown glass and 19th century wallpaper or hand-made, marbleized paper on the back.
The quietude that people respond to in my pictures is, in part, because of the way the pictures are made: no flash; no harsh electric light; not even the sound of the shutter—just a lens cap removed, and then gently replaced. This encounter provides, for me, a metaphor for looking. My visual impairment allows me to provide a meditation upon the experiences of vision: visual loss is, after all, a visual experience.
I find now that I love speaking about my experience and sharing it with the public. I spoke on the BBC and “Fresh Air with Terri Gross” on National Public Radio about what it is like to create photographs without having my full eyesight. I’ve lectured at the International Center of Photography in New York, and at the Berkeley Art Museum. This is what I want to share: I’ve realized that it is not through my eyes, but through my mind, that I see things. Looking involves sound, sight, touch, and memory. What does it mean to see? What is it like to look, or to be looked at? These are questions I will continue to explore in my photographs and in my life.
(Αναδημοσίευση από το site της Holden Luntz Gallery)
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