Judy Fiskin

These five photographs were taken in 1987 and printed in 2006, when I
went through all the thousands of proof sheets I had produced between
1972 and 1995 and found a number of images that I had overlooked at
the time that I now felt should be printed.
They are photographs of
above-ground tombs that I shot in New Orleans in 1987.
People are
not buried underground in New Orleans for reasons that are now
tragically obvious.
I must admit, though, that at the time, I shot
these structures for mostly formal reasons.
I am of a generation of
artists that was raised on Minimalism, and like other artists my age,
I was infected with it.
So I was attracted to small, easily read
structures (stucco bungalows in L.A., these tombs in New Orleans),
which referred to minimal sculpture.
But my minimalism was
minimalism with a difference:
my structures were decorated and
embellished.
My work has long been concerned with issues of
decoration, taste, and in the case of the bungalows, class striving.

Another thing you should know about my work is that it is very
small.
It is just over 2 1/2" square.
You might be looking at an
image on your screen that is actually larger than the work really
is.
I came to that scale intuitively, but I can trace the roots of
it.
When I was growing up in L.A., there were relatively few
examples of real art to see.
When I studied art history, which I did
for seven years,
the images I was seeing were slides (no scale) or
tiny reproductions in art history books.
So I was used to seeing art
small and imagining it larger.
And when I started taking
photographs, walking around with a viewfinder to my eye, I again
experienced a way of seeing which made size ambiguous.
When they’re
on the wall, these small photos force you to confront them nose to
nose and bring you into a disembodied world where size becomes an
imaginary construct.
The effect of the size on the subject matter I
was shooting was to miniaturize it and make architecture seem closer
to sculpture, which was how I experienced it in my mind’s eye, as an
object, not as a place to inhabit.

The other thing about these photos is that they don’t look like
traditional photographs.
I found that by making them small, I could
experiment with flatness and linearity and make photographs that look
something like delicate line drawings or etchings.
I always based my
work in the real, but nudged it toward representation.
The objects I
shot often were or contained representations, and the way I chose to
print them took them away from the realm of the transparent document
and toward the realm of aesthetic representation.