laurieopal

Cross posted from Body Impolitic


It is wonderful to have work in a major museum show in Japan again.

I have 7 photos in an exhibition at the National Museum of Art in Osaka. The exhibition is “Collection 2: Our Life” and it runs until the 22nd of May. My work is in the “Life and Sexuality: Our Bodies” section.

My work in their permanent collection is from the solo show I had there in the early 2000’s curated by Akiko Kasuya. Photos are both from Women En Large and Familiar Men. They chose from their permanent collection, and I’m really happy with their selection. And I’m especially happy that my work is in an exhibition that deals so directly with the pandemic.

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From their exhibition description:

In the spring of 2020, our lives were drastically altered by an unknown infectious disease. Even today, the world remains in a chaotic state, and many people’s lives are fraught with anxiety. This has caused us to look more closely at our bodies, and to literally consider the wonder and joy of life on a daily basis.

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Life and death, one of the fundamental human themes, has also continued to be an important theme in art. This edition of the collection exhibition, titled Our Life, consists of approximately 110 items, including a number of new acquisitions. Here, we introduce a group of specially selected works that deal with a variety of themes related to life, such as birth, maturity, old age, and death, as well as issues that underlie all of these themes, such as time, memory, forgetting, and the humor and sorrow of living.

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I wish I could be there. But I do have work in another exhibition in Japan opening the end of June, and (virus permitting) maybe I’ll be able to go. Cross your fingers for me.

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Follow Debbie on Twitter.

Follow Laurie’s Pandemic Shadows photos on Instagram.

I've been meaning to post here about my new Pandemic Shadow project and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. It's cross-posted from Body Impolitic.

I've always admired the feminist website/ art blog Feminine Moments. It's edited by the Danish artist Birthe Havmoeller and features fine art made by lesbian, bisexual and queer women artists worldwide. There is a monthly newsletter in addition to the website that has new work and interviews, artist's statements and images. Her choices are always interesting and often stunning.

I subscribe to it and in a recent one she had Queer Feminist Art in Lockdown.

I immediately thought of my Pandemic Shadows project and sent her the Instagram link to the gallery. She reacted to it immediately and it is now featured on the Feminine Moments website. I also had the opportunity to see her work and it's beautiful.

The artist's statement below in the most recent development of my relationship to the pandemic and Pandemic Shadows. The more images I shoot, the more I am learning about light, shadows and the changes time brings. Here in San Francisco we are now in winter light and everything in shadow looks very different. I'll be putting up some winter light images on Instagram very soon.

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This was taken in Armstrong State Park on the Russian River before the wildfires.

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I’ve been walking & living in the shadow of the pandemic and the lockdown, photographing the Pandemic Shadows that I see everywhere. I became interested in shadow patterns when I began taking iPhone photos. The pandemic, the isolation, and the walking I’ve been doing, have transformed my vision, making it far more emotionally involving and centered in my present life. It lets me make beauty in hard times.

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This photo was taken in the early winter light on Dolores in San Francisco.

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The lockdown has made me pause, observe and create images of shadows that depend on light and time and sometimes air. For me they capture an essence of this pandemic time. My work is developing very intensely, in terms of emotion, choices and differences from my previous images. The California wildfires changed the light and shadow. The people I’ve known in fire danger seem to be influencing the work as well.
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And this was shot on of shadows on rice paper in my studio window.

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One of the beautiful places shadows can go for me is into abstraction. I use it a lot in composition but my work has not been usually abstract. It’s good for my artist’s heart to go somewhere else.

In my usual day, shadows have become a major part of my perception. This is the first time I’ve seen myself in my art this way. It’s a shock to have the way I see change so powerfully. The world has changed so much and so quickly and my vision has inevitably followed.

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Please follow me on Instagram if pandemic shadows interest you. Instagram

Cross posted from Body Impolitic
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My portrait of Frank Brenes from Familiar Men is being exhibited in Barcelona, Spain as part of ‘The Art of Photography,’ a collaboration between PH21 Gallery (Budapest) and Valid World Hall Gallery (Barcelona) a renowned center for the visual arts.

It runs from from January 6 – 13, 2020. I'm delighted that my portrait received an Honorable Mention from the jury.
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Although photography first emerged as a technological invention, it was also quickly conceived as an artistic practice as well. Pictorialist photographs in the nineteenth century were created to look like paintings, while advocates of straight photography in the first part of the twentieth century strived for the purely photographic means of creating photographic meaning. Street photographers devoted the medium to capturing the fleeting moment, while in the last part of the twentieth century many photographers turned to staging and directing in order to utilize photography for artistic visual communication. Art photography also includes numerous genres and creative practices from portraiture, landscape and still life to abstract and conceptual photography. In this call we ask contemporary photographers to show how they understand art photography in the twenty first century. -

PH21 Gallery has all of the images from the exhibition on it's website. They are really worth looking at. It is an extremely striking show!

(Cross posted from Body impolitic)


I started looking at sidewalks and their patterns as art sometime this year. The contrast between the geometric forms of the pavement and the organic designs that can overlay them became a kind of beauty to watch for. Most of my art has a complex subject that is reflected in each image. It's a pleasure to walk through the world and spontaneously come across something that I can make art from.

The pattern in the pavement itself, can be both subtle and beautiful when it's a part of a larger image.

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Except for cropping some of the photos, none of them have been Photo-shopped or manipulated. So there is a reality to these reflections of my vision.

Cross=posted from Body Impolitic

These are two store widows in my neighborhood in San Francisco's Mission district. I've been wanting to do this for awhile and these were the first two that really worked for me.
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Casa Bonampak
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Botanica Las Tres Ninas Blancas

Cross posted from Body Impolitic



I am especially delighted that my portrait of Bob Guter from Familiar Men is included in the “Ryan Gander -These wings aren’t for flying’’ exhibition opening today at the National Museum of Art, Osaka. I admire the complexity and uniqueness and diversity of Gander's work and the way disability consciousness is woven and not woven into it.

His work is so diverse that there is no way that only four choices give a sense of his scope

This solo exhibition will present approximately 60 important and new works by Gander, who is now regarded as a standard-bearer of new conceptual art. As the mysterious title suggests, the exhibition promises to escort us to an unknown world.


At the same time, Gander will curate an exhibit made up of works from the museum collection. Using the instinctive human ability to think in terms of comparisons as a premise, Gander will present the works in numerous pairs. Though based on a physical resemblance, the fact that the pieces are derived from different genres and eras will inspire a host of fresh perspectives. And the exhibition, held throughout the entire museum, will allow us to experience the limitless potential of the visual arts. - from the Museum description



His work is formally diverse and has included, "a chess set, a new word, a children's book, jewellery, customised sportswear, glass orb paperweights and maps," as well as photography, films, and drawings. Considering Gander’s work, "Appendix", art critic Mark Beasley said: "It’s an unwieldy yet fascinatingly open account, somewhat like lucid dreaming, which shows the artist at his most arch, open and revealing ... an attempt to discuss practice in a form sympathetic to the work in discussion."
… most of Gander's art is completely removed from the hand of the artist and carried out by a team of technical specialists. He is often physically incapable of carrying out the making of the work himself. Wikipedia


I’m fascinated and impatient to see what art work my portrait will be paired with. I’ll be writing more about this after the exhibition is up. Meanwhile I’m excited.

These were taken at my daughter choreographer Cid Pearlman's environmental dance performance Economies of Effort 3.

The photographs I posted previously in Dance, Light and Shadows were abstractions about movement, light and shadow. The dancers were part of the composition.

This sequence of photos are about the intimate relationship between the dancers, and between the dancers and the audience. The dancers are Cynthia Strauss and Sara Wilbourne.

Making these sequential photographs is something new for me. I always work with the relationship between my images. These particular images are revealed (sometimes only in part) as you scroll down. This can only happen on a screen and creates a different relationship between the viewer and the photo.

(cross-posted from Body Impolitic)

I was delighted when I heard that my photograph Debbie Notkin and Tracy Blackstone from Women En Large was the juror's choice in Body, an international photography exhibition at the PH1 Gallery in Budapest, curated by Zsolt Bátori. One of the reasons in that the overall quality of the exhibition is thoughtful and excellent.

From PH21:

It is always inspiring to see how photographers approach an exhibition theme from different creative angles. Photographic depictions of the human body range from the aesthetic through the documentary to mystic uncertainty, renewing, commenting on or criticizing received modes of expression…

The human body has been the central subject of various photographic genres. From documentary, event and street photography to fashion photography and the nude, photographers have always found ways of constructing images in which the specific portrayal of the human body gains significance. That significance may stem from the rich layers of meanings emerging from specific socio-cultural contexts, the visual interaction of the human body with the surrounding physical space, or the intriguing compositional possibilities offered by the body itself. Some explore movements, study expressive gestures and postures, some concentrate on the anatomical beauty, some narrate whole lives through the depiction of the human body. Others may offer stern visual criticism of our normative conceptions of the human body and the ways it is portrayed in mainstream Western media.
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I read the juror's critique of my photograph this evening and it's one of the most sensitive and perceptive commentaries I've received on a photograph.

Laurie Toby Edison’s Debbie Notkin & Tracy Blackstone is the juror’s choice of this exhibition. This complex image incorporates several layers of photographic meaning. Our initial reaction to the calm composition might be to contemplate the symmetry of the image and the captivating texture of the curtain that takes up a significant portion of the photograph, providing an excellent nonfigurative background for the shapes of the two women on the couch. The lighter inner part of the two sides of the curtain lead our eyes down to the two figures emerging from the darker shades of the blanket on the couch. As we are drawn to the faces, it might even take some time to realize that the two bodies are in the nude. Indeed, it is one of the most powerful aspects of this image that nudity is portrayed in such a “natural” and subdued manner that it goes without saying – almost even without registering on our perception. It may take some extra effort to understand why the nudity of the figures is not more salient, despite also being an identifying thematic and visual feature of the photograph. The secret might lie in the bright serenity in the look of the two women. Their expressions are filled with such joy and peacefulness that the image simply washes all received – and often oppressively reinforced – social conceptions of the human body light years away. Social criticism is delivered in a serious, beautifully composed but at the same time effortlessly cheerful photograph.

Laurie says:

I wrote about discovering Sojourner Truth's cartes-de-visite in my post " Sojourner Truth: I Sell The Shadow To Support The Substance."

I came across the first mention of the cartes-de-visite in a video interview with Nell Painter, who has written a superb biography of Truth which I highly recommend.

Painter mentioned on the video that Sojourner Truth had used photography. Of course, that immediately registered with me and I had to find out more. As a photographer I immediately assumed that she had taken photographs. But when I did some reading, I learned about the cartes-devisite that she created. Because she was not literate this was the only medium where she had complete control of her presentation.

... Sojourner Truth was perhaps the most famous African-American woman in 19th century America. For over forty years she traveled the country as a forceful and passionate advocate for the dispossessed, using her quick wit and fearless tongue to fight for human rights.

Nell Painter says: No other woman who had gone through the ordeal of slavery managed to survive with sufficient strength, poise and self-confidence to become a public presence over the long term.

… Sojourner Truth, according to the Willis/Krauthamer book Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans And the End of Slavery, understood the power of photography, and actively distributed photographs of herself:

“Those pictures were meant to affirm her status as a sophisticated and respectable “free woman and as a woman in control of her image.” The public’s fascination with small and collectible card-mounted photographs, allowed her to advance her abolitionist cause to a huge audience and earn a living through their sale. “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance,” proclaimed the famous slogan for these pictures."

Quotes are from the previous post.

As I read her biography I was reminded again and again what is lost in the simplified potted histories of social change and reform that most of us learn. She was born in slavery in up-state New York, grew up speaking Dutch, was emancipated when New York ended slavery, and spent as much of her life promoting religion and spiritualism as abolition and suffrage. She is stereotypically depicted as saying "Ain't I a Woman" with a southern accent. (She never said it.) Her life, and 19th century America, were complicated.

Serendipitously, my friend Geri Sullivan read my post and wrote that she would be in Detroit at the same time I planned to be there in July. And she was going to her home town of Battle Creek on the trip. She knew Mary Butler at the Sojourner Truth Archive in Battle Creek and we could go there. I was amazed and delighted! (The archive is in Battle Creek because Truth lived there in the latter part of her life.)

The archive was planning to reframe their carte-de-visite's of Sojourner Truth. Because I was coming they very thoughtfully kept them unframed until I visited. I was able to (carefully) hold them and photograph them. I looked at them in my hands and realized I was holding something that she might have held. I'm surprised my hands didn't shake.

We spent several hours at the archive. Mary Butler is profoundly knowledgeable about Truth and the radical political 19th century history of Battle Creek. She was very generous with her time and her knowledge. We talked and I was able to look at a number of both documents and copies of documents that give a shape to what I know about her life. It was a memorable afternoon and I'm grateful to both Mary and Geri.

These are the photographs I took of the cards.

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I love this photograph. The portrait feels like I can see her face across time.

I'll be posting again about Battle Creek, Detroit, a remarkable sculpture of Truth, the Kimball House Museum and undoubtedly more.

I'm getting my photographs ready for the Detroit art show. I'm bringing 2 photographs of Berndatte Bosky (who is one of the guests of honor) from Women En Large and the photo of Samuel R Delany from Familiar Men that was just in the National Queer Art Festival exhibition.

I'm polishing some earrings and small pendants right now and hopefully will be finished with them by tomorrow.

The group includes my mythic Japanese tiger pendant. There was long period of time when there were no tigers to see in Japan and the artist's prints of them are imagined in some excellent and somewhat alien ways. Geri Sullivan went to an exhibition of these prints a long time ago and gave me the catalog. It was the inspiration for this design. Coincidentally I bought a small figure of a tiger today that I think will end up as part of a photograph one of these days.

I'm thinking about a honeycomb black opal and starting to imagine designs.