Wide Angle explores photography as end and means

Of the nearly 6,000 items in the permanent collection of Vanderbilt University's Fine Arts Gallery, only
311 of them are photographs, according to gallery director Joseph Mella. Nevertheless, the gallery's collection covers a broad spectrum of photographic work in Wide Angle: Photography and Its Influence on Contemporary Art, on view through Feb. 27. An accompanying exhibition, Bestia contra Bestia, closes March 17.

Wide Angle explores photography as a medium and as a means to other artistic ends through
40 photographs and other artwork derived from photographic images.

Contemporary art source

One striking example of this latter approach is German artist Christiane Baumgartner's 1 Sekunde. Though Mella has shown this work before, he wasn't able to stretch it out along one wall as he's done in Wide Angle. The 25 woodcut prints — Baumgartner broke down one second of time into 25 frames — are displayed in a single row, mimicking an unrolled spool of film.

"What makes her work curious and interesting at the same time is she draws on this tradition of woodcut printmaking, which grew out of Germany, and combines that with the contemporary aesthetic of video and photography," Mella says.

Baumgartner's process involves taking video, then manipulating the images in Photoshop before transferring them onto wooden blocks, which she then cuts by hand. From these, she makes traditional woodblock prints.

Gerhard Richter also uses photography as the first step in his creative process. Teydelandschaft, one of the few color images in Wide Angle, is a watercolor-like offset lithograph from 1971. It is also one of the gallery's most significant recent acquisitions, says Mella, who refers to Richter as the most important living German artist.

Photographs as photographs

Polaroids by Andy Warhol bridge the two sides of Wide Angle in that they were initially used by Warhol as studies or sketches for his iconic portraits, but then began to take on an artistic life of their own. The five Warhol pictures in this exhibition include shots of ordinary people, including children, taken from 1977 to 1985.

A suite of poster-size images drawn from Donna Ferrato's Tribeca series includes a photograph of a woman standing on a sidewalk, contorting herself to adjust the seam of her hose; behind her a man puts on his jacket and fixes his collar while holding his newspaper between his knees. In another Ferrato photograph, a glowing neon sign announces a liquor store on a dark, rainy night.

Ferrato's documentary photographs of tormented women and children won a number of awards in the 1990s and also helped focus attention on the problems of chronic abuse; one image of a woman with two black eyes was used on the cover of a 1994 Time magazine issue on domestic abuse.

None of those are included in Wide Angle; if they were, they would make an interesting segue to the adjoining exhibition of works by Madrid-based artist Josй Luis Raymond.

A touch of art history

Raymond's photographs in Bestia Contra Bestia reference Spanish Renaissance paintings with a rich, dark palette, period costumes with frilly white collars. Into these tableaus, Raymond mixes spray-painted graffiti, people clad in modern attire and scenes of torture and domestic violence.

"It has this great narrative quality about it; it looks like a Renaissance painting, but it's certainly not," Mella says.

The Raymond photos were added to the schedule after Vanderbilt Spanish professor Edward Friedman saw them in Washington, D.C., last fall and brought them to Mella's attention. Originally, Mella was planning to use both gallery spaces for Wide Angle, but decided to use Bestia Contra Bestia as a spin-off show since it fits the theme of connecting photography with other visual art.

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