Art Photography Bryan Whitney | Joburg Fringe Art Exhibition
The Joburg fringe Exhibition for 2017 in Johannesburg South Africa has come and gone, as one of the Artist who participated in the Fringe this year, I was drawn to the work of one particular Artist/Photographer Bryan Whitney.
In my brief interaction with Bryan, I came to understand his passion and appreciate his work in Photography. With his vast experience in this genre Bryan's work
'Mini Structures: 3D X-rays of Oil Cans,' stood out especially for me at the fringe.. This is what Bryan had to say about his work....
This is Bryan Whitney Artist Statement
This collection of x-rays reveals architecture in a surprising form: oil cans used to dispense oil
for sewing machines, motors, and other mechanical devices.
The simple industrial shapes reveal both similarities and elegant variations on a theme. They are accidental stupas, a Buddhist temple form found throughout Asia.
Whitney, whose work often focuses on the “cosmology of architecture”, saw this collection of oil
cans posted by an artist friend Allan Wexler on Instagram. He borrowed the collection and,using a stereo (3d) x-ray technique, transformed the simple oil cans, emphasizing their architectural form.
The resulting images were printed on transparency and placed on windows. When viewed with anaglyphic (3d) glasses the forms appear to float in space outside the window.
Bryan Whitney
RADIO FLORA
NILES - Photographer Bryan Whitney has long been
enamored with the beauty of the natural world.
He also, however, knows enough art history to
realize that simply capturing flowers in their natural state falls dangerously
close to becoming an art cliché.
"They're just gorgeous things in
themselves," Whitney says by telephone from his home in New York City.
"The fact that they are natural and living somehow makes them a classic
thing to do." A lot of photographers have shot calla lilies, for example, like
Imogen Cunningham, and Georgia O'Keeffe, of course, painted them. It's become a
little bit of a genre all its own."
So when Whitney discovered floral radiography, he
saw a way to use X-ray techniques to explore the deeper beauty of such familiar
botanicals. A collection of 20 of Whitney's 16-by-20-inch images, titled
"Radio Flora," opened Friday at Fernwood Botanical Garden and Nature
Preserve. An opening reception for the new exhibit will be held there today.
"I first started doing experiments about 10
years ago," says Whitney, whose wife worked as a conservator for the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. "They used to X-ray objects to see paintings
and furniture and things like that.
These are not medical X-ray machines. They
are industrial so they can do a lot more things. As a photographer I thought,
'That sounds like a pretty cool technique, I'd like to try that.' So I dragged
in all sorts of things and started X-raying them."
While he found these images of inanimate objects -
from toys to soda cans - interesting, it was the prints of X-rayed botanicals
that resonated with his artistic sensibilities. The radioactive rays that
penetrated the plants preserved their beautiful exteriors while showing their
more delicate and interactive structures from the inside out.
"This idea of transparency is a big deal for me
in my work and always has been," Whitney says. "I've done a lot of
self portraits called 'The Transparent Man' where I did very long exposures and
stood there a little bit and walked out so you see this ghostly figure. So
there's something about a different way of seeing things that feels important
to me."
Floral radiography actually has been around for some
time. John Hall-Edwards, who was a pioneer in the medical use of X-rays in the
United Kingdom, published images as early as 1914, but the process didn't
receive much attention until the 1930s with the work of Hazel Engelbrecht and
Dain Tasker.
Engelbrecht's work sprang from scientific research
of botanical specimens, whereas Tasker was interested in artistic presentation.
Tasker, who was chief radiologist at the Wilshire Hospital in Los Angeles,
became known for his ability to set the X-ray machine and exposure to record
the subtle differences in plant tissue density. His most well known image, of a
calla lily, was printed by Ansel Adams and displayed at the 1939-40 Golden Gate
International Exposition in San Francisco.
Others have sporadically played with the process as
well, including Albert Richards, a retired dental X-ray professor from the
University of Michigan who did a lot of work in the 1960s and '70s, publishing
the book "The Secret Garden," which featured 100 floral prints.
The technique itself isn't much different than
getting a medical X-ray at the hospital. The X-ray machine shoots gamma rays
through an object, which is placed in front of sensitized film or a digital
plate.
The shadow of the object is formed on the plate, but in this case you
can see through the object rather than just the outline of it. X-ray film, once
exposed and developed, can be processed like most photographic negatives,
yielding black-and-white prints.
"A lot of people don't understand that there
are no lenses involved," Whitney says. "They'll ask what kind of
X-ray camera I use. Well, it's not really a camera. It's a device that shoots
out rays in a beam and that goes through the object and onto a plate and the
image is formed that way. It's kind of like a photogram."
Most early prints looked much like your typical
medical X-ray, showing stark black and-white contrasts. Whitney has built upon
the technique in the way he is able to limit exposure with more sensitive
equipment and his use of color that more closely captures the original beauty
of his subjects.
"I was originally taking those negatives and
printing them in the darkroom," Whitney says. "The negatives are very
difficult to work with because flowers are so delicate and it's hard to
separate because there's very little difference in density. ... Now I can scan
the film and work on the computer and hand color them there.
I pretty much go
with what the natural color is. Instead of a red I might go to more of a magenta,
but I try to keep it in line with what the original flower is. There's a lot of
delicate work to make it work well. It's almost like I've drawn the outside of
the flower by hand to make it separate perfectly from the background."
Whitney, who grew up in Ann Arbor, first became
interested in photography during his freshman year of high school.
"I started taking a photography class when I
was 13 or 14 and my grandfather game me his 1932 Leica Model D," Whitney
says. "He just said, 'Here, you can use my old Leica from the '30s.' I
said 'Cool, I'll take pictures with that.' And that was just it.
I've been
doing photography ever since. Teaching photography, doing fine art, commercial
work. It's been my whole career."
After earning his bachelor's degree in the psychology
of art in 1981 from the University of Michigan, and his master of fine arts
degree in 1988 from Temple University's Tyler School of Art, Whitney headed to
New York City where he received sponsorships and grants from the International
Center for Photography, the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as a
Fulbright that allowed him to travel to Eastern Europe and lecture on
photography.
When he returned to New York, he started working in both
commercial and travel photography shooting for Fortune, Wired, Martha Stewart,
The New York Times and others.
"I learned how to shoot architecture and
interiors - I already had that sensibility - so I learned that as a trade to
make a living while continuing to do my fine art work," Whitney says.
" But commercial photography isn't as rewarding as doing fine art. You're
always trying to make a certain type of picture and there's a lot of
expectations of what things should look like. I'm more interested in
experimenting. That's why I gave it up and started teaching."
Whitney has since taught at Rutgers University, and
he soon will be teaching classes at both the International Center of
Photography and the Center for Alternative Photography in New York while
continuing his own fine art work, which has been featured in exhibits from the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the Hagedorn Foundation Gallery in
Atlanta.
While his fine art work also explores architecture
and light, it's his images of calla lilies, roses, irises and poppies that seem
to have the widest appeal.
"I've done a lot of work outside of X-ray
photography, but it's interesting to me that it has been one of the more
successful things I've done," Whitney says.
"I've X-rayed a lot of
different things, but I prefer and love plants simply because there's something
ultimately beautiful about them.
I guess people respond to it because it's just
a different way of looking at that beauty. It reveals something you kind of
know is there but can't really see."
Check out Bryan Whitney's website for all the info you need about the Artist....Enjoy.
Check out Bryan Whitney's website for all the info you need about the Artist....Enjoy.
-- ARTIST INFO:
bryanwhitney.com
Miabo Enyadike
Miabo Enyadike
