Judy Fiskin: The End of Photography and Selected Photographs

Greenberg Van Doren Gallery is pleased to present Judy Fiskin: The End of Photography and Selected Photographs, a solo exhibition featuring a film and photographs by Judy Fiskin. The exhibition will be on view from September 12th to October 27th, 2012. The book signing on September 12th will celebrate the recent publication of Judy Fiskin’s catalogue raisonné, Some Aesthetic Decisions: The Photographs of Judy Fiskin, published by the J. Paul Getty Museum. The catalogue raisonné will be available for purchase at the gallery throughout the exhibition. This selection of Los Angeles-based Judy Fiskin’s gelatin silver prints captures varied landscapes and vernacular architecture highlighting planned and unplanned symmetries, natural forms mirroring man-made, and anthropomorphic structures in several site-specific series. Informed by her study of art history, Fiskin’s attraction to her signature small-scale photography arose from looking and discovering works of art through reproductions. Humor permeates these series where certain information, emotions and ideas of beauty are shown through visual means. Fiskin edits her surroundings, underlining certain repeated visual choices made by the public at large, and presents variations on a theme. She explains her attitude towards her subject matter in an interview with John Divola in 1988: “There’s a way that you can’t avoid that act of redemption as a photographer, especially if you’re doing anything that looks at all documentary; the work is going to be read that way anyway. I didn’t try to avoid that reading or undermine that reading, but I was more interested in something else: a feeling of the arbitrariness of [taste]…. Once the comfortable meaning of things slides away... it opens objects up for you to really see them and have a strong experience of them. That’s a positive thing, and it can be applied to everything – even sixties apartment buildings.” Fiskin’s late work shifts from photography to film and video. In her black and white film The End of Photography (2006), a female voice laments the demise of film in photography as well as the end of the darkroom while images of the traditional landscape and architecture of Los Angeles flash every few seconds. These film frames have the same attention to composition and detail as Fiskin’s photographic works. Worldwide showings of this film include the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona; Images Festival, Toronto; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and The Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival, among others. Judy Fiskin was born in Chicago, IL and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She received her B.A. from Pomona College and her M.A. from University of California, Los Angeles. Fiskin’s work was included in several of the Pacific Standard Time exhibitions including In Focus: Los Angeles 1945-1980, J. Paul Getty Museum (2011-12) and Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2011). Fiskin’s work is included in many museum collections including the J. Paul Getty Museum, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.