Revival, a group show, and Dogs In My Life by John T. Mendes

Once, photographs were made with big, bulky cameras that used glass negatives. By the early 20th century they were rarely ever used, but a notable exception was John T. Mendes, who documented New Orleans from 1916 through the 1920s. A keen observer who loved dogs (the title was taken from a memoir he wrote), Mendes melded a pro’s techniques with a childlike sense of whimsy as we see in FEMALE IMPERSONATOR, 1919, a year Carnival was canceled but the drag queens came out anyway, or MISS LUCILLE NEWLIN AND MAYOR BEHRMAN WELCOME REX AT CITY HALL, FEBRUARY 1917, below. Aviators, dog circuses, floods, Mardi Gras and children’s parades are among the subjects that inhabit this charming view of the city, a refreshing survey from a local original who was totally unknown until these glass plate negatives were discovered in an Uptown attic. A striking 120 page catalog, published by the UNO Press, is also available.

Today, even as digital photography has made film cameras almost obsolete, there is new interest in even older, more archaic techniques. REVIVAL at the Homespace Gallery features tintypes, daguerreotypes, photogravures, cyanotypes and other 19th century processes employed by talented contemporary photographers. In their hands, the act of image making is transformed from a routine pastime to something far more poetic. Ordinary things like the thistle in a glass in Kevin Kline’s tintype, or the close-up of the extruded velvety innards of a magnolia flower in David Halliday’s Van Dyke print, are revealed in a fresh new light. One of the more dramatic images is Josephine Sacabo’s photogravure SLEEP WALKER, top. Photogravure is a complicated process that melds intaglio printing and photography, but some far less complicated yet no less dramatic images were made by some Louise S. McGehee School students, who used the old cyanotype process in playful new ways, for instance, FANTASMA by Sarah Miller, below. Curated by the Ogden Museum’s Richard McCabe, REVIVAL suggests that some traditional photographic processes don’t just get old, they sometimes–in the right hands–get better. ~Bookhardt

The original Gambit Weekly posting is here: bestofneworleans.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A67419
Bookhardt’s Inside Art New Orleans posting, featuring additional images can be seen here: www.insidenola.org/2010/01/revival-at-homespace-mendes-at-hnoc.html

See the entire image gallery here.

It’s been said that those who do not study the past are destined to relive it, but those who study it sometimes seem to relive it as well. Ray Donley’s paintings at Gallery Bienvenu hint at Carnival in Venice back in some distant, decadent, possibly Renaissance time, but their tone also reflects a slyly contemporary perspective. Louviere + Vanessa’s Folie A Deux show at A Gallery for Fine Photography mixes a romantic Victorian vision with elements of latter 20th century photography as well as conceptual art. The result is a series of light boxes that suggest what characters in a Jules Verne novel might have imagined the photography of the future would look like. What we see are images formed by rows of Super 8 mm filmstrips lit from behind. Each frame of each strip of film contains only a small, unrecognizable bit of the overall image, but seen from a normal viewing distance, they come together in much the way that the tiles in a mosaic come together to form a coherent whole.

??The images include a voluptuous lady in a lacy period corset in Rendezvous (pictured), skulls in ancient catacombs, and sailing frigates on stormy seas suggesting the era of Jack London, Alexandre Dumas and Toulouse-Lautrec. It is as if a time-traveling Victorian brought an 8 millimeter movie camera back from a visit to the 20th century, and then, not knowing what it was, used it to make photo-mosaics from filmstrips. But the technical tricks don’t end there. For each of these light boxes — dubbed “cinegraphs” by the Bywater-based husband and wife duo — there is a corresponding large format photograph, and if that sounds more normal, it’s really not, because each image is printed on a gold- or silver-leaf surface. It is almost too complicated, and all that fancy technique almost serves to obscure a vision that is both alchemical and poetic, a view of an imaginary neo-Victorian parallel universe, though a Bywater-based alternate reality. — D. Eric Bookhardt

The original Gambit Weekly posting is here: bestofneworleans.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A67002
Bookhardt’s Inside Art New Orleans posting, featuring additional images can be seen here: www.insidenola.org/2010/01/louviere-vanessa-at-gallery-for-fine.html

Wonderful photographs by Louviere and Vanessa

Camera crazy couple

Vanessa Brown thinks that she and her husband/art partner Jeff Louviere may have come up with a whole new photographic technique.

I’ve certainly never seen anything like it.

The pair, who go by the professional name Louviere+Vanessa, begin with a photo of, say, skulls in the Parisian catacombs. They use a computer to electronically dice the photo into thousands of tiny squares, like a crossword puzzle. Then, they film the skull grid, square by square, with an old-fashioned home movie camera.

They transfer the movie to DVD for safe keeping. Though, honestly, the resultant movie isn’t much to look at — just a bunch of grainy gray squares whizzing by. Not a skull in sight.
But the process is only half-finished.

At this point Louviere+Vanessa ruin the movie by snipping the serpentine film into strips, which they painstakingly lay in vertical rows, within a hand-made light box. Now, instead of just thousands of grainy gray frames flashing past, you see a pixelated version of the skulls, speckled with stripes of light from the home movie sprocket holes.

The effect is like seersucker in celluloid.

“It’s probably about 300 hours of labor put into each box, ” Brown said. “That’s including the cutting up of the original image, reshooting that on Super 8 film, transferring the Super 8 to DVD, cutting up the film and laying it out, the construction of the box, the wiring, and adding all the features.”

That kind of labor-intensiveness could drive anybody crazy. Which may be one of the reasons Louviere+Vanessa titled the exhibit Folie a Deux, a French term for a shared madness. But the results are worth the hours and hours of work. The finished photos, which Louviere+Vanessa call cinegraphs, contain elements of high-tech digital art making, obsolete film photography, minimalism, and romance, seasoned with a splash of (sometimes macabre) playfulness.

The dimmer switch on the catacombs light box, Brown said, is made from a human finger bone.

There’s nothing I admire more than artistic experimentation. In the years I’ve known Louviere, 38, and Vanessa, 39, they’ve restlessly sought ways (toy camera films, blood-toned photos, gold leaf prints) to define themselves as anything but ordinary photographers.

“We don’t want to do the same thing, ” Brown said of their explorations. “It’s got to be something that interests us; it has to be new to keep our interest and challenge us.” With Folie a Deux, Louviere+Vanessa have taken their boldest step yet into the unknown. Let’s hope they never step back. Their shared creative devotion has made them two of New Orleans’ most exciting artists.

A Gallery for Fine Photography, 241 Chartres St., 504.568.1313.
Hours: Thursday through Monday, 10 a.m. to 6, through Jan. 31. Prices: Each cinegraph is $15,000 and comes complete with a DVD of the film from which it was made.

Arts writer Doug MacCash can be reached at dmaccash@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3481. For more art stories and videos, visit www.nola.com/arts.

The original article appeared in the Times Picayune on Dec 25, 2009, and is available online here: www.nola.com/arts/index.ssf/2009/12/wonderful_photographs_by_louvi.html