The Brooklyn Rail

Back in 2000, Liz Deschenes curated a show at the Andrew Kreps Gallery called Photography about Photography, which included thirteen artists and outlined her approach to the medium. That approach might be described as: rigorous, unorthodox, engaged with the materiality of her work as well as with the architecture in which it is shown, and deeply invested in the medium and history of photography (though she rarely uses a camera). Her show at Miguel Abreu Gallery, for instance, references an object called a black mirror, also known as a Claude glass (because it was associated with the seventeenth-century landscape painter Claude Lorrain), which reduced and simplified the range of colors in the landscapes being painted. In previous series of works, Deschenes has referenced the zoetrope as well as the work of Étienne-Jules Marey and his photographic experiments recording movement. She is keenly interested in the conditions of display and the mechanics of viewing: how we experience her works visually but also physically, bodily. Deschenes began her career as an artist in the 1990s—she graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1988—a time when narrative photography was the dominant mode, and she has stayed the course with her experiments in abstraction and in conceptual photo-based artworks that have consistently challenged—and expanded—the definition of photography.

Jean Dykstra (Rail): Hi Liz, am I reaching you in New York?

Liz Deschenes: Yes, I’m in New York right now. I taught at Columbia last night, doing group critiques, and I’m getting ready for the exhibition Gravity’s Pull, at Miguel Abreu Gallery, in November.

Rail: Tell me a little bit about the upcoming show.

Deschenes: A lot of the work that I’ve done refers to some of the apparatuses of viewing. And now I’m going back, once again, to before photography was even invented. There are two devices that I’m looking at: one is the black mirror, which is often called a Claude glass. The attribution is to seventeenth-century landscape painter Claude Lorrain, but no historian can even figure out if Claude Lorrain himself actually used them. But the people who made work in his lineage most certainly did use them, and even Matisse used them in a later period.

Rail: What is a black mirror? 

Deschenes: At the time when they used them—and they started using them in the 1600s —it was a small, black convex mirror, which was made out of polished obsidian stone—highly, highly polished. And the idea, as far as I understand it, is that a landscape painter would go into a landscape, and there’s so much information in terms of color and tonal range, and when they would look at these convex mirrors, it would reduce the palette so that it could be sort of narrowed down. I’ve been talking to painters about it, and painters are like: why would anybody want to narrow down the palette?

Rail: Right!

Deschenes: But if you read what Matisse wrote about it, he was working in the forests of Fontainebleau, and it was a way for painters to sort of describe what they saw without being overwhelmed. Arnauld Maillet quotes Matisse in his book, The Claude Glass, as saying, “One of the properties of this black mirror is that it suppresses all sensations of color, like a vermillion red that, when one looks at it with the mirror, always seems to come from somewhere beyond the surface of the image; it’s a trumpet blast in the landscape; it didn’t suit me.” And then I’ve heard from glass artists that they went out of fashion because they were sort of associated with the occult.

Rail: Wow, really?

Deschenes: Yeah, and then it was not permitted. I know a lot more about how they were using them in the landscape to reduce the possibilities—it was a way to understand what they were seeing. And to be able to bring it back to the studio, because if you were making paintings, you’d have to bring these drawings back. Photography was also invented in the late 1830s.

Rail: Right.

Deschenes: That’s one apparatus I’m referring to. The other one is also attributed to Claude Lorrain. And once again, nobody knows if he actually utilized them, but they’re colored filters, which is kind of amazing in the 1600s. People were using colored filters in the landscape. So say they want to recreate a winter scene, but it’s not winter, they would hold up a cool blue filter. If you ever look at Claude Lorrain’s skies, you can see that some of them are extraordinary in their hues and saturations. If a landscape wasn’t warm enough, they’d use amber or yellow filters for viewing. This is sort of an oversimplification, but you’re projecting onto the landscape what you want it to be, versus what it actually is.

Rail: It’s so cinematic, too, like the idea of day for night….

Deschenes: Absolutely. And all of these elements are ones that I’ve thought about, but now I’m really looking at the beginnings of the way we think about imaging right now. I look at people’s social media accounts, and they’re like, “unfiltered.” And I’m like, no, everything’s filtered, whether you realize it or not.

Rail: On the most basic level, everything is filtered. Even if you don’t change anything.

Deschenes: Exactly. And then, on the not-basic level, from AI imaging onward, there are obviously so many layers to it. So those are the bookends of what I’m thinking about. How do I make this material, because all these devices were small-ish—you know, you could put it in your pocket. People were falling in the landscape as they were looking through these filters because they were so taken by them. And we know how many people have gone to lengths to capture something for their social media accounts, and to what end?

Rail: Trying to take a selfie and falling off a cliff.

Deschenes: Yeah, I mean, people have died for their pictures. So how do I make it physical for now? I want a physical manifestation of the virtual—so I’ve looked at screens quite a bit. I started looking at glass, and Corning makes the glass for most of our cell phones and computers, a really thin glass they call Gorilla Glass.

Rail: I didn’t know Corning made all those screens.

Deschenes: So I was like: what would happen if I got Corning, or a Corning affiliate, to make these materials? What if they did it at a size that’s not cellphone size or computer size? So I came up with a size that I wanted, and I’m making over twenty 29-by-29-inch pieces of glass that I’m UV printing on. And I’m UV printing some of the colors that are associated with the Claude filters. So there’s some yellows and some ambers, blues, forest green, and rose and they’re all monochromes. And you probably know this, monochromes have been present in my work since the beginning, and everybody thinks monochromes in photography are really easy to make, and you know what? They’re not.

Rail: No, I know.

Deschenes: So I’m super excited about these, and they are not going to be installed on the walls—they have a front and a back. They’re going to be hanging in the gallery, and they’re going to be creating a new, for lack of a better term, a new architecture, or a new way of traversing through the gallery.

Rail: So they’re going to be hanging, not in frames on the floor, like you’ve done before?

Deschenes: Yeah, exactly. I’ve had the work sit on the floor in frames with steel plates to secure them, but these are going to be hanging from the ceiling with really simple hanging devices. I’m excited about what we’ve been working on.

Rail: So as a viewer, when I’m walking through the gallery, will I be walking through them and in between them? 

Deschenes: At some moments, yes.

Rail: Oh, cool.

Deschenes: Yeah, you’ll move between the front and the back. And where the gallery has that wall end before the windows, the glass pieces will extend to the windows and will be hung in front of the windows. You would think that these would act like filters, right? That you’d be able to see everything through them. But I purposely came up with a print procedure in which you get the color going through, but the information that you see through them is actually not that visible. Say there’s a building on the other side of the window—the building’s actually not legible. And that was purposeful, because I want to talk about screens, and all the information that we receive from them—that you have this illusion of accessibility and legibility, but there’s actually a lot of opacity. 

Rail: That’s really interesting, the whole idea of screens, and their role in our lives.

Deschenes: Yeah. And then, I’m working with some glass fabricators, and we’re trying to make large-scale black mirrors. 

Rail: Oh really? 

Deschenes: I’m not sure where they would even go in the gallery right now. They might be in a separate room. But the black mirror is there whether it takes a physical form in the exhibition or not. People didn’t necessarily use these apparatuses concurrently, but they certainly came to being around the same time.

Rail: The same time as the filters?

Deschenes: Yes. So whether the black mirror is physically there or not, it’s conceptually there. And then—so many of the ideas are about, as I said, projecting what’s desired versus what’s actually there.

Rail: It’s so interesting how your work is at once very removed from the camera, but at the same time, so steeped in the history of photography and photographic apparatuses.

Deschenes: When I started doing the cameraless work, I thought, architecturally, of the spaces as being the camera.  In the installation at the gallery—that space is really challenging—so how do you alter that space in a way that keeps it comprehensive? I’m hoping that through the installation I talk about that imposition, about what artists imposed upon landscapes in previous generations—and I use landscape broadly.

Rail: You mean the way artists of any stripe have imposed their own point of view onto landscapes and their own artistic apparatus onto the way we see landscapes? And again, landscapes being used in a broad way?

Deschenes: Yeah. And maybe a better term than landscapes is environment. And then it just so happened that people started working outside and bringing it back to the studio. That was obviously a new phenomenon and representation.

Rail: I saw your previous show at Miguel Abreu—Rates (Frames per Second) in 2018. One of the things I loved about the show was that not only did you have to engage with the works on a visual level, but you had to engage with them on a physical level, too. It had to do with seeing, but also with experiencing the works bodily, and seeing yourself seeing them. There were so many layers, and it seems like that’s part of what you’re aiming at, the way you engage with the architecture of a space. There’s a similar physicality in the current show, in which works are going to be hanging, and viewers are going to be walking in between the works.

Deschenes: It’s a really important component to me. And I didn’t mention this, but I’m only printing on one side of the glass, and that ends up being the more matte side. And then the other side of the glass is obviously highly reflective. And the glass is hyper thin, it’s just like … 1.1 millimeters, which is just crazy thin. So I’m also hoping that these objects are going to be unfamiliar to people.

Rail: That brings me to one of the questions I was thinking about: I read an interview in which you said you would just as soon eliminate all wall labels from your exhibitions because you don’t want to overdetermine how people interpret them, which I totally understand. And at the same time, I wonder, there are so many layers to your work and so many rich references. How important is it to you that someone who’s looking at your work grasps any of those aspects?

Deschenes: I actually gave a lecture at Art Center in LA last fall, and towards the end, I got this sort of snarky question/comment about, like, how do you expect any viewer to apprehend all of it? My response to it was I really want work that has a multitude of entry points. And somebody from the audience—it was kind of amazing when this happened —this graduate student goes: John Baldessari used to say that any given audience has much larger capacities of comprehending than they’re given credit for, right?

Rail: Oh, what a great answer.

Deschenes: Yeah it was amazing. Particularly since we were in LA and given Baldessari’s history of teaching there. I guess that’s my answer, that people can ascertain information in all sorts of ways. There are so many different ways to learn, right? I was one of those kids who maybe learned through color, or, you know, I was really interested in maps, and so I was a visual learner. Other people, like my mother—she was a tactile learner.

Rail: And sometimes, you wonder how much time a viewer is spending just reading the wall labels versus looking at the work itself and formulating an idea. When a work of art is a little mysterious or not obvious, it demands a bit more of the viewer. You want to stand there and figure out what you’re looking at and figure out what you think about it, or how you feel about it.

Deschenes: I totally concur. And that’s what I said to this comment at the art center after this student was so smart to bring up Baldessari. Don’t we want the bar to be high? I feel like so many of our encounters are dumbing down. Shouldn’t we aspire to more?

Rail: Well, apparently, societally, we don’t… But one of the things I’ve really enjoyed about seeing your work in certain exhibitions is the provocative or unexpected way it’s been installed. I’m thinking of the Anna Atkins exhibition at the New York Public Library—Anna Atkins Refracted: Contemporary Works—where your work was sort of tucked up in these little out of the way corners. For me, it felt like a happy discovery when I spotted your pieces. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Deschenes: It’s so nice that you bring that up, because that was really hard for me to do, knowing that so many people were not going to see the works. But if you’re going to be in conversation with somebody like Anna Atkins, historically, it’s about her being known and unknown. She was an incredibly accomplished artist, and I still think she hasn’t gotten the full consideration she deserves.

Rail: Right, I agree.

Deschenes: So what I did with that installation, I think, points to the fact that she wasn’t seen. And that was important to me. I wanted to point to how she had been obscured. I mean, you probably know this, but she sent Fox Talbot her books, and that was before he had made any of his books. I’m not saying he made his books because Atkins sent him hers, but that’s remarkable, knowing that. You know, there’s a reason why they look as fresh and contemporary as they do right now, because not only was she an amazing artist, but she was also an incredible technician. So I did want to talk about invisibility, because even if you’re fortunate enough to have an audience like I have had, sometimes you’re mis-seen.

So those were some of the things I was thinking about. When you put yourself in a place of not being seen, that was a complicated decision for me to make.

Rail: I imagine. It’s also a generous decision, because you’re talking about her invisibility, by making your work less visible. Hopefully, of course, you’re encouraging viewers to think about those concerns. I thought it was really smart.

Deschenes: Thanks, I really appreciate that. I think it’s a great venue. You know, it has maybe the largest collection of photographs in New York. They have more photographs than the Museum of Modern Art does. It’s such an important place. There’s no barrier of entry to the New York Public Library. It’s free. And I don’t think that people have the intimidation of going in there that they might have at museums or galleries. 

Rail: I agree.

Deschenes: So it actually is genuinely public.

Rail: I want to go back a bit, because another aspect of your work that interests me is the way you’re pushing the definition of what a photograph is. And I was wondering if you could talk about the show that you curated in 2000 for the Andrew Kreps Gallery, Photography about Photography, because it seemed like it outlined some of your ideas about the medium.

Deschenes: That’s so great that you’re asking me about that, because that particular show was out of frustration, because in 2000, the dialogue in photography was so narrative oriented. And I felt like a lot was being lost, or just not addressed. I think there was a frustration that my work wasn’t part of a dialogue, and all these other artists that I was interested in were working in ways that were not really considered as a group, but as individual gestures. There were all these people who were thinking about the materiality of photography along with the histories of photography—from James Welling to Uta Barth—I wanted to look at the shared agendas of these artists.

Rail: You studied at RISD as an undergrad, is that right?

Deschenes: Yes, as an undergrad. I studied photography at RISD. It was pretty traditional.

Rail: I was wondering if, for you, there was ever a move away from narrative photography, or was that something that never interested you?

Deschenes: The work was landscapes, and when you were a photo student at RISD, you had to do more than one exhibition for your thesis year, and I did two radically different exhibitions. Already then I was considering how viewing impacts your experience of the work. And that wasn’t a calculated thing. I remember one of the venues I was given—somebody’s work was going to be installed near mine, and it was sort of loud. And I was making really small prints and I knew the work around me was going to impede upon that. So then I was like: oh! you know, you don’t have to use what you’re given. You can shift it, and you can change it. So even when I was a student, there was the idea that exhibition spaces are not neutral, right? They can be reconfigured or configured—they can be malleable. I built walls in order to better serve the viewing of the work.

Rail: That leads me to ask about Tilt/Swing, because that certainly engages with the exhibition space in a really interesting way and showing the work in a way that’s unorthodox and makes the viewer think about how they’re looking at the work and where they are physically in relation to the work.

Deschenes: That’s actually part of how I started thinking about installing this show and not having work be on the walls. You know, it obviously comes from a drawing that Herbert Bayer did when he was teaching at the Bauhaus, that never got realized. And it was never intended for photography; it would have been paintings that would have been included. So I was always fascinated by that particular drawing and how to bring that to life and change it. I took some liberties with it. In Herbert Bayer’s drawing, somebody wouldn’t view the work right in the middle of the work. But with Tilt/Swing, I wanted people to be there in the work or outside of the work. It’s amazing that he went to such lengths to come up with such an amazing design and then put a viewing platform in the work.

So some of these things are really subtle, but—hopefully—you can change the way people view work or understand the work, and they’ll bring that experience to other exhibitions or even back out onto the street. Emily Dickinson says it really well, she says if you change one small thing, you change everything. And I’m glad you brought up the floor pieces. Viewers might think: “They’re supposed to be on the wall!”

Rail: Right. It sort of dislodges something in your brain a little bit, because you have to rethink everything.

Deschenes: Yeah, dislodge is nice. That’s a good term to think about what some of the strategies have been.

Rail: A lot of the work that you do, it’s intended to oxidize and to change over time.

Deschenes: Yeah. That’s totally right. And that’s in opposition to the blue prints, which for the most part I’m making with UV, or dye-sublimation prints that are supposed to last a really, really long time. So you have this one thing that’s not supposed to change, in relation to this other thing, like silver, which is so volatile. I am fixing them—they’re fixed and they’re washed. And they’re mounted. So they go through all the procedures one would go through to have a traditional black and white print.

Rail: I wanted to go back to the screens a little bit—the blue screens that you did that were based on a conservation card, is it called the Blue Wool scale?

Deschenes: Yeah, it is. I was actually in the Museum of Modern Art’s conservation department one day, and they were doing these tests on material that I’d given them that was in Tilt/Swing. I had no idea that they could accelerate the aging of the materials so that they can show what it’s going to be, I don’t know how many years out. If I can, when I’m visiting institutions, I always want to see the conservation department. That, to me, is where the genius of most institutions lies. So I was leaving there one day, and I saw this card on the wall, and it had eight different versions of blue, and I asked Lee Ann Daffner, who is one of MoMA’s photo conservators, about it. And she explained that when they have work on view that has pigment, they have to know how much color is fading. And I had no idea that they did this. And she was like: so there’s one in the gallery, and there’s one in a drawer. And then, after three months or six months or whatever, we compare the two to see how much color has faded, and then we make decisions on that, based on how many times a work can be shown and for how long.

Rail: But to some extent, chance and unpredictability are part of your work, right?

Deschenes: Yeah. And sometimes that results in things that—I did an exhibition in London a few years ago in a gallery space that had been Wolfgang Tillmans’s studio. They were tearing down the building, and I showed work of mine, some of which hadn’t been seen in a while, or had been in storage, or had been returned by collectors that had altered over time. And that was something that I was really interested in seeing—what happened to this piece that I showed and it’s been in storage for the last twelve or thirteen years. Some of the discoveries are really great. And some of them are less, shall we say, compelling.

Rail: I’m sure this doesn’t happen often, but occasionally people will return work that they’ve bought, because the works have changed?

Deschenes: Yes!

Rail: Which I think is so funny, because that’s baked into the work… the fact that it will change.

Deschenes: I think the galleries even have a disclaimer, you know. But this is where it goes back to photography, right? The expectations that people have for the medium of photography are just so unrealistic, right? Like photographic materials change—even the digital ones, like all the people who can’t figure out how to migrate files. And I haven’t been able to figure this out, even though I’ve thought about it for a really long time: Why do people have unrealistic expectations for photography? It’s supposed to be uber archival, and this and that, but no, it has a span, and that span to me is really intriguing, because it sort of flies in the face of these unrealistic expectations.

Rail: Maybe it has something to do with the history of the medium, and it being produced by a mechanical device that led people to think it would be more fixed, more permanent.

Deschenes: That’s really apt actually, I think the mechanical beginnings could be a really big part of it. And maybe we have the same issue right now that the machine can supersede the hand.

Rail: Maybe that’s the same reason that there’s this belief that photography depicts some truth, which has never really been the case, because as we said at the beginning, the filters are there in some way.

Deschenes: Yeah, photography gets a lot imposed on it, but everything is obviously a translation.