For about ten years, I developed and exhibited a photographic series I called urbansurfaces. This series, and the work that followed, is the body of work that feels the most central and foundational to who I was and who I am becoming as an artist.
What was the urbansurfaces series?
The original urbansurfaces series was luscious and paintstakingly produced documentary photographs of found surfaces in an urban environment. They were photographed on medium format transparency film and printed on high-gloss color material like Cibachrome and Supergloss Type R.
The photographs were straight documents of surfaces, although when viewed out of context of the environment, the surfaces looked like “art”. It was important that the photos were unmodified and unmanipulated: these images that looked like paintings or etchings or lithography were as-is depictions of something seen “in real life”, and making this clear to viewers changed something for them: they began to see the world around them a little bit differently.
How did urbansurfaces originate?
In order to tell the story about how these images originated, I need to give some personal history.
In 1994, I had the great privilege of going to work at a company called Ivey Seright in Seattle. Ivey, as it was known by the folks who knew of it, was a premier photography services provider, offering world-class photographic film processing and printing. In addition, Ivey was a place where the most phenomenal humans gathered to work - the employees there were fabulously talented artists of all stripes, and that creative energy vibrated every day.
When I joined Ivey I had only recently completed my BFA, and was deeply into photography. Because I worked at Ivey, I could use the lab's world class darkrooms to print my own work. I honed my color printing skills on the fabulous Cibachrome and supergloss Type R equipment.
At the time that I joined Ivey, there was a group of fine art photographers who started gathering to talk about their work, provide informal critiques and support, and trade ideas about working with esoteric and historic photographic processes. This group was a "photo circle", and - tangentially - one of the members started us organizing towards creating a non-profit gallery space that would exhibit work by emerging artists, focusing on photographically related works. (That gallery, FotoCircle, operated in Seattle's Pioneer Square from about 1996 until the Nisqually quake in 2001). Anyway - Ivey connected me to this amazing group of folks, and they listened and critiqued and encouraged me to keep going in the first couple of years, as I was finding my vision and my voice with the series.
The combination of a highly creative environment, access to world-class equipment, a passion for photographic image making, and an active community of engaged photographic artists provided the magic soup in which the ideas could emerge. This, combined with discovery of the rough industrial areas of Seattle, led me to begin the series. After this image, captured in a train yard in south Seattle, I was hooked:
The urbansurfaces photographs
Given how much work went into producing large, extremely sharp, high resolution photographic prints, it's a minor tragedy that the only scans I have of this series are tiny little scans that were probably created for the web site I hand-coded in 1999 (the catalog for my solo exhibition at FotoCircle gallery in February of that year). These images give the general idea, but do not convey the sometimes breathtaking clarity and saturation of the originals. Here is a selected group of some of the images:
Solo Exhibition - 1999
Perhaps the pinnacle of this work was a solo exhibition in February of 1999, for which I hung about thirty 20x24” cibachrome and Type R prints, framed. What an ungodly amount of work that was.
I still have the postcard from the show pinned up above my desk.
I found extremely sparse residue of evidence of the show still on the web:
- Rice University has an archived page (without images or stylesheets) with a description of the show:
- Urban Surfaces
- A genuine process of discovery laid the foundation for Urban Surfaces, a series of Cibachrome and Type R color photographs by Kristi Palmer, an early founder and alumna of FotoCircle. By combining philosophies of meditation and jazz-influenced improvisation, she has created images charged with abstract color and form that mirror the buzz, beauty and erosion of the hidden urban landscape.
- Visit the Urban Surfaces exhibition catalogue, created by Kristi as a concurrent presentation to the physical exhibition in Seattle.
- Amazingly, there is still an art listing from the Stranger for the show:
- KRISTI PALMER--Urban surfaces that when isolated look remarkably like abstract paintings, with a depth and texture rarely seen in photographs. FotoCircle, 163 S Jackson St, 624-2645, through Feb 27.
What happened after the exhibit?
I received amazing responses to that exhibition, including offers of more exhibitions. But for a complicated series of reasons, I switched my life focus away from pursuing those opportunities and towards other aspects of my life, making new photographs but with less fervor than I had previously. And by about 2005, the world of photography had so completely changed that making film- and darkroom-specific prints was no longer feasible.
The pursuit of gorgeous ubansurfaces images didn’t end for me, but the original series of documentary photographs did.
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