Story

Sometime in the late 1990’s I was writing a proposal for an exhibition in Holland.  One requirement was that I include a book.  If I had been more experienced I would have known that meant an exhibition catalogue or a monograph on my work.  But I didn’t know that so I made a book.  

In those years I was using black and white film and doing my own printing.  Most of what I photographed was close to home.  The people and the spaces formed a thread that ran through most of my work.  As I chose and sequenced photographs to make the book I felt that thread emerge.  I titled the book Story.

I sent my book off across the ocean and eventually it returned to me but it was awarded no exhibition.   However, not long after, the sequence of photographs that made up Story was selected to be part of a group show.

I was given several feet of space on which to show Story in a form that I was calling a “Book On A Wall.”  It took me most of a summer to construct a foam core underpinning, to figure out how to bevel the museum board to make perfect joints, and to plan out how to install it in the gallery.

In the gallery the pieces of my construction came together and the sculptural Story surprised me by creating lovely shadows along the wall.

Recently I built another book on a wall.  Having worked with museum board regularly and foam core often over the years, I was able to construct this new structure much more efficiently.  Still, Story was a formative experience for me — a beginning of sequencing and of book making and in presenting a sequence in a gallery.