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Catherine Wagner
The Lamps of 1900
2006
© Catherine Wagner; Courtesy Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco, and Gallery Luisotti, Santa Monica
LL/18161
Photo Synthesis
Colin Westerbeck
Catherine Wagner's exhibition "A Narrative History of the Light Bulb" will be at the Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco March 28-April 28.
The real subject of a photograph is never the landscape or people or objects: it's light. Hernandez, New Mexico, wouldn't seem eternal had Ansel Adams not photographed it at the exact moment that the last light of day fell on the town. This truth took on special fascination for Catherine Wagner when she made photographic prints from MRIs in 1996. She has a special knack for objectifying such elusive phenomena, as she shows in her most recent project photographing light bulbs.
There are no people in Wagner's photographs (the MRIs were of pomegranates and other inert matter). She has made pictures of classrooms, artwork stored in museums, apparatus in laboratories and the interiors of homes without the owners present. Wagner thinks of her tabletop arrangements of light bulbs as still lifes or sculptural forms.
Yet, despite the absence of people, her work has often struck me as a surrogate for portraiture. In the home interiors, she was often drawn to walls on which family pictures were ganged. In a classroom setting, the collection of stuffed birds or desks turned this way and that might also be group portraits made in absentia. And the photograph seen here could be titled "The Class of 1900," as if it were an assembly of wunderkind inventors rather than one of their inventions.
[Originally published in West Magazine : March 25, 2007, p.9]
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