Exhibition Review: Salt Lake City
Reawakened Beauty
Tillman Crane's Jordan River
The Salt Lake Art Center's exhibition Reawakened Beauty: Tillman Crane's Jordan River Photographs is the inspiring culmination of a project begun by the Utah photographer in 2005. In these photographs Crane's seasoned and insightful eye explores a relatively neglected feature of Northern Utah's landscape and makes it the multi-faceted subject of a compelling exhibition. The images are also featured in a new book titled A Walk Along the Jordan, 2009, produced in collaboration with the Art Center. The exhibition will certainly expand public awareness of this unique and dynamic natural formation whose aesthetic vitality is sensitively and perceptively rendered by Crane's cameras.
The Jordan River connects the freshwater Utah Lake to the saline Great Salt Lake, a phenomenon repeated in only one other place in the world, the Holy Land's Sea of Galilee and Dead Sea. The majority of Utah's population is centered around the area the Jordan River traverses, but little consideration is given to the waterway that once marked the line between "civilization" and the expanses of Utah's western desert. Crane's perceptive eye saw potential in documenting this river in several thousand photographs. Fifty-five of these are printed in the book and thirty are on display at the Art Center.
Crane was a photo-journalist who became a fine arts photographer in the early 1980s after he "became tired of seeing people die." He left Maine for Utah and began the photography program at the Waterford School in Sandy. Although Crane is passionate about what his craft, he does not take photographs for their own sake, but uses the medium to "celebrate the world and see a little more beauty," he says.
A Walk Along the Jordan is the fourth of Crane's books, two of which feature Scotland, the home of Crane's ancestors. After the drama of photo-journalism and the majesty of Scotland, one might question Crane's decision to devote three years, thousands of photographs and hours, to an obscure river in the Northwest region of Utah. Crane need not explain himself in exacting terms; the choice is readily validated in the photographic results.
Crane's choice of subject was a matter of serendipity. His home backs onto the Jordan River; he sees it everyday, and in thinking of a new project, the Jordan River seemed ripe, unexploited material. And, as the viewer to the Gallery or the reader meandering through the pages of his book will attest, Crane's methods and the river’s environment were a good match.
Since his days as a photo-journalist, Crane has always worked in platinum printing and uses only a large format or pin-hole camera. The effect of the platinum-based photographic paper and his choice of camera, allow for a unique tonal range with an infinite possibility of nuance and effect. Crane's subjects receive a long exposure, allowing for unusual and often unexpected results, such as the haze of the river's water as it rushes over boulders. The platinum-based paper, which registers only the vicissitudes of tones that lie between black and white, can give the subjects a more or less abstracted feel and the light can have a more lucid or romantic effect.
Crane describes the Jordan River as "a wonderful place to find serenity." As a natural environmentalist, Crane notes the benefits of the river to the many whose environment it is. He comments; "If you take the time you can walk, or ride your skateboard. It will never be in its original condition, but it has a relationship with the community." Crane is but one member of a community who is recognizing river's aesthetic as well as ecological vitality.
Jay Heuman, Curator of Exhibitions at the Art Center considers these images resonating in a tripartite manner. "Some of the photographs show the nature of the river without human intrusion. In others you get the extreme opposite and in some there is middle ground."
One photograph that shows the river in a natural state is "Flood Waters, Winchester Park: Taylorsville, UT." |1| The image is a narrow rendering of water streaming through a cluster of trees and the long exposure lends a smoky effect to the river as it courses through the branches. The resultant beauty is appropriate to this riparian scene in its purity. Another image, "Olympic Bench: Northwest Center Park, Salt Lake City, UT," |0| might be classified "somewhere in the middle." This is a successful rendering of a synthesis of the natural and artificial, a photograph, romantic in effect, of a lone bench that is placed there to take advantage of the lovely view of the Jordan River. In this image Crane demonstrates how communities can advantageously use the river to the benefit of it and those of the community. Finally, "Riverside City from Tithing Bridge: Rotary Park, Draper, UT," |2| is an example of the "intrusion" that is too often the case when the natural and artificial are joined. The result of the debris accumulating along the river's edge is injurious to the river, and the hazardous material, the unsightly waste, and misuse of what could be a harmonious union is deleterious to the housing development adjacent to the river.
The 55 photographs that have been chosen for the book capture the spirit of the river. He does not hide the neglect of the river nor exaggerate its beauty, yet both are evident. Cleaning projects have already begun to address the abuses of the river such as “Blueprint Jordan River: Rehabilitation of the River,” and an increasing public presence is beginning to understand that a healthier synthesis of the river and its environs benefits both. Such concerns resound from Crane’s images which are not subversive or derisive, but honest and beautiful.
Crane’s work is without pretense, has integrity and mirrors beauty with reality. He is an artist but his work is not artifice. He may be comparable to Henri Cartier-Bresson of the early 20th century who built a relationship with his camera. For Crane, like Cartier-Bresson, not every photograph will be a masterpiece, not each will find its place in his book, but the one’s that do will, like a mosaic, allow the viewer a piece of truth.
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Hagen Haltern . . . from page 1
The class, begun in 1982 by professor Hagen Haltern, was an intense experiment that seems to have deeply affected the artists involved. Haltern retired this spring, and to mark his commitment as a teacher curator James Swensen has put together an exhibition of works by Haltern and his students entitled A Product of Time and Faith.
Hagen Haltern was born near Hamburg, Germany shortly after World War II. He grew up in Bonn and studied art at Cologne and Dusseldorf. During his studies he came to an epiphany: art should be a means to value diversity and unity in a harmonious whole.|1| At the same time he became a convert to the LDS church.
Haltern's conversion eventually brought him to Utah, where he taught art at BYU. After a few years of teaching he began thinking about the problem of art education. Looking back at masters like Michelangelo and Velasquez, Haltern noted that they had all started early (at thirteen Michelangelo was a late beginner) to take on serious work as apprentices in other artist's studio. Today's art students, he thought, begin too late, "and we struggle, often in vain, to make up for lost time." The Intensive Drawing Studio was his answer to the problem.
The course was designed for serious, committed students, ones willing to spend nine hours a day together, four days a week. Because they spent so much time working in the Studio, others in the art department started calling the students the "cave people."
The class was an experiment. Only after it was half-way done did the group approach University officials with the idea: "May we interest you in a class?" As Swensen notes in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, the students described the class as "a creative environment where students can, in an atmosphere of trust between student and teacher, learn the creative process and develop their own imaginative visions and visual intelligences."
Not all of the artists who participated in the Studio became masters or even professional artists. But since nationally less than 10% of art students make art five years after graduation, the number of students from the Studio that did become professionals is impressive.
Tom Schulte, who said Haltern could "elicit a commitment to medium and art that very few could do" went on to become a profesor himself, and has taught sculpture and drawing at BYU.|2| In his career he has experimented with various media, from painting and sculpture to furniture and stained glass.
Bob Adams, an artist based in Phoenix, Arizona, has also experimented with various media, creating large-scale public sculptures, as well as the intimate "landscapes" displayed in this exhibit -- compositions of vertical lines of color not quite broken apart but certainly hazed out by the feathers that constitute them.|3| He described the Studio as a "magical" atmosphere where the students consumed and meditated on art.
Richard Gate, a professional artist who returned to Utah after living in California for a long time, says his most vivid memory of the Studio was a Rauschenberg catlogue that floated around the space for the entire year.|4| He says Haltern's philosophy, like Rauschenberg's, was a "grand unified-field theory embracing the entire visual universe: a metaphysical quest for light."
This Rauschenberg catalogue may be a key to understanding the similarity between the three Studio alumni I mentioned at the beginning of the article. Larsen,|5| Robertson |6| and England -- and Gate should be included in this group as well -- all experiment with "collaging" disparate elements to create a visual whole -- something that can be traced back to Haltern's own epiphany as an art student. So we might say that Rauschenberg was a visual grandfather for these artists, but it was under the intense tutelage of a brave and dedicated uncle -- Haltern -- that they learned to embrace their heritage.
Artists of Utah
The First Time
Stefanie Dykes Remembers
Stefanie Dykes, Artists of Utah board member and cofounder of Saltgrass Printmakers, fresh off the plane from a printmakers conference in Bristol, England, stopped by the Finch Lane Gallery while we were filming interviews with artists from the 35 x 35 exhibition, which she helped organize. We sat her down and asked her about the first time she heard of 15 Bytes and why she serves on Artists of Utah's board.
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