John Sanchez
1996, 16 December
Rachel Rosenthal, Artist
Source requested
© John Sanchez
 
Photo Synthesis
Colin Westerbeck
 
Prints of photographs by John Sanchez will be included in a sale of artwork to benefit the Santa Monica Museum of Art on April 28 from 7-9:30 p.m.
 
This was the first in a series of photographs John Sanchez has made documenting the art world. He asked Rachel Rosenthal to step into the alley behind her L.A. studio so he could take her picture in indirect natural light against a white background taped to a wall. This was also the way Richard Avedon made portraits for his series "In the American West."
 
The white-out starkness is as appropriate to Rosenthal as it was to Avedon's famous picture of a beekeeper with a shaved head, also made in California. Rosenthal's circular gesture suggests that she wanted to make herself the lens through which the portrait would look into her soul. Her hands seem all-encompassing; she's using them to get a death grip on the image.
 
Her intensity conveys the difficulty Rosenthal has had focusing her energies throughout her career. Life contained so many possibilities, it was hard to choose. Born to wealthy, cultured parents in 1926, she grew up in Paris and New York. Her influences and acquaintances ranged from Antonin Artaud to Jasper Johns, and the richest fruit born of these was the Instant Theater, an improvisational company she founded here in 1956. Before that, she'd feared she was guilty of "dilettantism." Since then, her performance art has been legendary.
 
[Originally published in West Magazine : April 22, 2007, p.11]
 
LL/18977