Located in the glass jungle of Century City the Annenberg Space for Photography hosts one outstanding exhibit at a time based on a distinct theme. The current installation, Digital Darkroom consists of 17 photographers from the US, UK and France who create surreal and impossible scenes using digital and/or darkroom manipulation.
The Annenberg is modern yet welcoming; the main gallery is circular with the display walls surrounding a central screening room showing an entertaining behind-the-scenes film. The Annenberg exhibits are always accompanied by a film narrated by the photographers discussing their creative inspirations, objectives and process. The films, including this one, drive home the amount of focused dedication and talent that goes behind each image.
The crux of the exhibit is that each artist had a creative vision that went beyond the capability of standard photography. It was technology that needed to catch up to their imaginations in order for them to bring their work to fruition. Jerry Uelsman, whose amazing black and white photographs are in the exhibit, is a pioneer in this field creating fantastic images since the 1950’s solely by darkroom manipulation. Inspired by the surrealist painters, Uelsman viewed conventional photography as limiting and unsatisfactory. In his work Ueslman uses up to 7 enlargers holding separate negatives to create a single image.
Uelsman is married to Maggie Taylor who combines 19th century tintypes and scanned objects with painstaking layering in Photoshop to create fluid and graceful images juxtaposing antique pictures with a modern composition and modern production.
Jean Francois Rauzier also featured in the exhibit stated in the film it is the conventional photographs that are ‘fake’ since they use only angle and one light to capture a scene. Using hundreds and up to thousands of photos in a single image he is able to attain incredible detail and resolution to an inconceivable landscape which imparts a Magritte-like quality to the final product.
A common thread amongst the artists is that their work pulls emotional response to the forefront. The manipulation serves to amplify feelings of vastness, complexity, austerity, power, serenity even humor that rise above the photograph itself. In short, the artists of Digital Darkroom provide a connection between the inner subconscious and concrete images from the outer world.
The Annenberg is free on weekends and parking is only one dollar for the whole day, which in Los Angeles is surreal in itself. Go see it.
Digital Darkroom is showing at the Annenberg Space for Photography until May 28th 2012. 2000 Avenue of the Stars, Los Angeles, CA 90067. W-F 11:00AM-6:00PM; Saturday 11:00AM-7:30PM; Sunday 11:00AM-6:00PM.
