Interpretations Through the Lens: The evolving art of photography

Founded in 1973 and located in the New Orleans French Quarter, A Gallery for Fine Photography is owned by photographer Joshua Mann Pailet, a dedicated artist who wanted to create a venue to collect, display, and sell 19th- and 20th-century photography. His gallery offers an amazing array of talent worth discovering. Pailet’s work is in numerous private and public collections, including the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Josephine Sacabo, who exhibits at the gallery and lives in New Orleans, is one of only a handful of photographer artists currently working in photogravure. She is known for figurative photographs influenced by poetry and literature. “I have been making photogravures for about a year, and learning this process has been as exciting and gratifying as my first contact sheet in the darkroom was 30 years ago,” she says. “From the moment I rolled back my first sheet of paper off the press, I realized that this was what I had been trying to do with my photographic prints for 30 years. I cannot imagine doing anything else now.” Viewing the image actually embedded in the beautiful paper surface is indeed rewarding.

Photogravure is an interesting technique that has played an essential roll in the origin and evolution of photography. While initial interest in photogravure was motivated by an effort to solve technical problems, over time photogravure was practiced for its own distinct merits. Photographers such as Paul Strand, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and Peter Henry Emerson made it their mission to reveal the artistic potential of the medium of photography, and they relied on the rich photogravure process to accomplish this end. Using photogravure, they painstakingly produced books, journals, and portfolios that enabled larger audiences to appreciate the artful capacity of photography for the first time. So enamored by the process, these photographers often chose photogravure for their own final prints.

Sacabo is equally enamored by this process. “These images are glimpses of the light that prevails even in the harshest places once the human spirit has assimilated it, images that have become a part of us beyond their meaning.” Her photography has toured in numerous solo exhibitions around the world, and her work is collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Biblioteche Nationale in Paris, and the Art Institute of Chicago, to name a few. She grew up in the Mexican ranchero culture of Laredo, Texas, and moved to France and England, where her earlier work in the photo-journalistic tradition was influenced by Robert Frank, Josef Koudelka, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. In the last few years, she has used poetry as the genesis for her imagery; she is especially influenced by Rilke, Baudelaire, Pedro Salinas, Vicente Huidobro, and Juan Rulfo (Sacabo is fluent in Spanish and French and was formerly an actress).

An exhibition worth seeing that has been held over throughout January at A Gallery of Fine Photography is Instinct Extinct, new works by Louviere and Vanessa. Jeff Louviere and Vanessa Brown have produced a new body of work resulting from their collaborative skills and their interest in using processes rooted in the past but explored with 21st-century technology. The new mixed media gold leafed photographs are on exhibit for the first time. Their photographs strip away the parameters of time, removing the benefit of that way of contextualizing and defining what the viewer senses. Instead, the images emerge as archetypes. These deeply personal tableaux challenge the viewer to enter the conversation. By distressing and abusing the final negatives, they reimpose time through the process of disintegration and decay, onto the timeless photograph. Their subjects converse with the camera and with their settings. “We let our drives take over with each image relating to the previous, creating a felt possible reality like a hallucination that involves all the senses and lets the viewer be the participant,” they explain.

Louviere is from New Orleans, Brown is from New York. They met in Savannah, where Louviere graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design; while there, he and three other artists created the world’s largest painting, a 76,000-square-foot image of Elvis, which was included in the Guinness Book of World Records. Brown began photographing at age 12 and won a Kodak International Award of Excellence in Photography when she was just 17. She graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology with a degree in photography. Their collaboration began as a series of tableaux created to resemble New Orleans crime scenes. They made their collaboration official by getting married in Switzerland in 2000. They live in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans. Their photographs are in the permanent collection of the George Eastman House, the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. ✦