serious obsession

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Center for Creative Photography's new exhibit draws from its extensive print collection

This incredibly rich display of work in series by such a diverse assortment of photographers is really all one needs to learn about the wonder of obsession and fascination, as well as the CCP's massive print collection.

Trudy Wilner Stack, curator for the Center, explained that the current show is "a real sampler. There's a little something for everyone, it's very wide-ranging in its content and style."

"We call it series and obsessions," said Wilner Stack, "because sometimes there is literally a specific series or project with a given name by an artist and other times it's a long-term repeated interest in a particular subject or theme.

"This is a broad enough theme that we could have gone in many different directions," Wilner Stack continued. "We have a lot of large collections of people's work in the show where we had to choose from six to 10 different series. It wasn't just which photographers to choose, but it was also which series, which group of pictures to show," she said. "And then within each series, there's a lot where we have a great deal more than is in the show. We may have 38 photos and we're showing 13."

The CCP is one of the only institutions in the world that focuses on photography to the extent that it does. Their entire collection is composed of archives of artists, a print collection and a research collection.

Rarely can anyone guess what a wondrous and elaborate thing the archives are. It all begins in what the CCP calls its "principal" archives. "These include almost 60 full-blown archives of individual photographers and in some cases galleries and historians and organizations. That includes not only their finished work, but their negatives, their papers and their photographic materials, like contact sheets and proof prints, or any kind of ephemera that's related to their career that would be of interest to scholars," explained Wilner Stack.

The gallery archives, which are separate from the principal archives, would appeal most ideally to those of us who like to read other people's mail. "We have over a hundred other small research collections that are not photographs," said Wilner Stack. "They may be somebody's letters, negatives or contacts.

"The print collection, stored in a different place, is all exhibit-quality material, finished work. And that has over 50,000 pictures which are available to us," said Wilner Stack. "There are very few collections in the country that can regularly do solo exhibitions of someone's work exclusively from their collection."

How can the CCP resist displaying this print collection in all of its historical, cultural and geographical diversity? In fact, this is part of why we get the privilege of being slugged with such a variety of photographic work in exhibitions like Bodies of Work.

"People think about us as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston or W. Eugene Smith and they have this very rigid idea because those are the famous names," explained Wilner Stack. "It's really important to do shows where the historical and the contemporary are shown together. It revitalizes the older, vintage work, and makes it feel more current, and then the current work takes on a new importance."

What a lot of visitors don't know about the CCP is that it offers them the opportunity to view the prints of a series that are not included in the show by making an appointment.

A person must be more than just a busybody to come in and sample these. The print collection, however, is something that any schmoe who wants to can get his hands on through one of these print viewing appointments.

In choosing what goes into a show like this, the CCP must "look for the best, most representative, interesting, diverse work," Wilner Stack said.

"Because of photography's relationship to time, it's much easier to explore something in different perspectives, to experiment with how you might do it, or to do it over a long period of time," said Wilner Stack. In other words, this kind of extensive fascination with a subject works for photography, because it lends itself to time.

Take Debbie Flemming Caffrey's Polly series, for example - all pictures of the same woman in the same house, put together into a cohesive series that gives Polly her definition as a figure of strength, hope and mystery. Caffrey captures Polly in different positions and changes the details of setting to illuminate the viewer. She also diversifies her photos by experimenting with the role of light in a dark environment. Light shines from Polly's own body while she sits leaning back in a dim room, or else it diffuses all around her dark silhouette.

Consider if Edward Weston had used paint instead of film for his pepper subjects. "If you want to paint 35 still-lifes of green peppers, it's going to take you a while, but you can do 35 photographs of peppers in a couple of days, a week, two weeks instead of a year."

If Caffrey's photos show that fascination is fun, W. Eugene Smith's photos illustrate that obsession can be outright delightful. In his series, As From My Window I Glance, Smith's photos consistently show the black frame of a broken window through which changing scenes are captured at distances with all possible camera angles. So perhaps he's obsessed with the particular activity of looking out of his window. His work is an engaging reversal of the peeping Tom syndrome. It is quite impressive to see how these simple street scenes are varied in subject, contrast, movement and are expertly framed inside such a little jagged hole. Who knew that two men emptying trash cans, a traffic jam on a rainy day or a woman with a hat box and a large ass could be so fascinating when seen from four stories above ground?

Photographers like these who work in black and white manipulate things like light, contrast, perspective and the frame of their image. Color, however, opens up new possibilities to these photographers. How can one really

experiment with the visually haunting image of the Ku Klux Klan without dressing up dolls in little brightly colored robes that cast long disturbing shadows? And likewise, when using toy soldier representatives of Hitler and the Nazis, one needs color and distortion to see them participating in little scenes of war and brutality as if they were set up inside someone's enormous diorama.

The show's concentration on this kind of series photography reflects the CCP's collecting philosophy, "which is not to concentrate on single masterpieces or master works or iconic images, but to try to understand, to really create documentation about an individual artist's vision, and the idea being that a single picture isn't necessarily as revealing as looking at whole body of work where you can see their process unfold and their thoughts are much more complicated," said Wilner Stack.