This is my husband's work, and there's absolutely no way to write about it without telling you about that first. And whatever my qualifications—curator, poet, sympathetic viewer—wife co-mingles with them all. This is very personal.
Since we met (that's 26 years ago, if you're curious) we talked about working together in some way—working together as artists. Goodness knows we've worked together as partners in every aspect of life, homebuilding, child rearing, acquiring stuff, cooking, cleaning the cat boxes, grieving losses, accumulating debts—but we've never done anything other than discuss things like making a book of poems and prints together, or maybe him teaching me how to find my way around a darkroom. And here we are, I realize while typing this, exactly at the point where we've known each other 50 percent of our lives.
We're both introverts who seem like we're not. And I think that's important to understanding these photographs. They are full of interiority. While a photograph, by its nature, captures something real that exists in the world in front of the camera (the pencil of nature, after all), these photographs are more than real. I'm having a hard time getting to the point. I feel them. Really, I become a little breathless, maybe a little sad, my brow creases. So, if you know Jamie, and you know his dry humor, his generosity, his fantastic martini-making skills, his intuition as a teacher, and all the other great public aspects of his persona, you may be surprised at this somewhat opaque, poetic, reverent manifestation of him.
They are objects of contemplation, spiritual. You look at them to meditate. In some of them you can recognize religious iconography as the source material—images of the Madonna and Child or Jesus, presented alongside photographs printed from found negatives, or negatives pulled from the files he has kept since the age of 14. Each image, regardless, bears the same sort of gravity. The prints are all relatively small scale as well—the smallness demands that the viewer come in close and the small-scale also enhances a sense of miniature, preciousness. There's reverence in every one—a worn talisman, a burnt candle, an active icon. There's a hand raised in blessing, and the face of Mary, full of knowing. Is this too much for our days of irony?
They are objects of memory too, as all photographs are. I look around this room and see traces of our life together (and myself at least three times). I can recall watching him take some of these photographs: on the Lake Erie shore, at the Red Roof Inn by the New York Thruway, on Mackinac Island. Yet even I, who was there, have to search for these recognizable bits. The process he puts the commonplace through renders it just recognizable. There's a sense of decay about the image. It adds distance, and a strange sense of objectivity—like a machine measuring the paranormal. And yet for me, this distancing, this depersonalizing, makes them all the more poignant. This is our world. Beauty that we want to capture, but can't quite. Time we'd like to stop, but can't, even temporarily—to give us a chance to savor it, examine it, understand it. How is it that we can read expression when there is no expression? Sometimes, it's like reading a poem in another language. There's a sense of shape, rhythm, and cadence we respond to, even without translation.
I also know, from my privileged perspective, that some of these images aren't necessarily what they appear to be. A number of them function on the level of trompe l'oeil—photographs of mannequins or miniatures that might appear to be real people or full-sized places. Between the images that aren't exactly what they appear to be, and the images that are obfuscated to the point that they aren't easily recognizable, there's definitely an intentional loss of information—like photocopies of photocopies with each generation growing a bit more vague. He strives for that sort of generalization, "It's almost as if I can't bear to see all the information. It's too much. It needs to be reduced and softened and dealt with in some way to sort of reduce its power."
And there are things I don't know about these photographs. Who is the woman with the triplets? It's a found image, and if you talk to Jamie he'll describe many of the photographs as found objects. He treats all negatives with a certain kind of objectivity. So, there's his wife doing yoga on the floor of the Red Roof Inn, and there's someone with triplets, and there's a box of erasers.
Last winter, I think it was, Jamie kept disappearing into the basement. He was building an Orgone Accumulator. Right before I met him I had taken a class called "Literature and Psychology," in which we read different psychological theories and applied them to novels. So, I knew what an Orgone Accumulator was, having read Wilhem Reich in 1988. Consequently, I didn't bat an eyelash when Jamie told me what he was up to in the basement. (Ok, maybe I did blink once or twice.) He was researching on the internet. Buying odd supplies at Home Depot. I remember thinking, "I am the only person on the planet whose husband is building an Orgone Accumulator." And then, when I realized he was designing it specifically to hold (and "charge") one 8 x 10" photograph, was I disappointed I was not going to get a super-charged husband? Of course not. Of the Orgone Accumulator he says, "It's powerful. You can't tell. You just have to believe me." And it makes perfect sense, because he is a deeply sensitive fellow with a highly developed sense of both the absurd and the hopeful. Like an atheist who takes photographs of religious paintings.
Jamie wants me to discuss the objects in the exhibition. We talked about these the other night. I see the objects as a humorous intervention. I'm not sure if he sees them that way. He says to me, "What's the purpose of an essay anyway? It's to unlock something that wouldn't be able to be unlocked." He says the objects are there to help people understand the photographs, but the objects are all kind of absurd. "This object is sitting in front of you. Time has nothing to do with this object. It's not subject to the treachery of photography in that it's about loss. The objects themselves address the issue of loss too, but they are present, in front of you. Presented as stupid objects in the world, not as a memory." Stupid objects in the world like an "Authentic Roman Coin." Objects presented by the artist as art or as truth. He says, "There's always a sense that there's some revelatory potential. You know, it's all chicanery. It's a little bit about bullshit, always. It's about faith, lies, and belief and all those things."
I asked him if he would cringe if I described his photographs as Pictorialist—they have a similar sense of reality having been aestheticized. He responded, "It's true. It's a romantic view of life; I think that is the connection."
What is going on that makes these photographs painterly? His most recent practice has been to take a digital image and print it on the wrong side of the paper. The printer's ink, which acts physically very much like paint, doesn't adhere the same way to the wrong side. It does unpredictable things. In his words it, "turns out completely wrong." He creates prints that look handmade through this mechanical process. In essence, he departs from machine-like predictability even while using a machine, and the result is the desired loss of information and the visceral quality that gives the prints their handmade feel.
Sometimes I wonder if his photographs should even be considered photographs. Are these photographs? Or is he simply using a device, like artists of the past used the camera obscura to aid their drawing? Perhaps the camera is a means to creating a vision that is ultimately realized in some other way.
This is my husband, so I find his brain, the invisible part of him, particularly beautiful.
email: jamie (@) jamiegruzska.net