Allen Schill
Still-Life Photography

Minimalist Textures:  Hard-Core Textural Photography with the View Camera 

These are more or less homogeneous surfaces and textures made of dried vegetation and either paper pulp or acrylic medium.  They are essentially attempts to create rhythm and vibration in the visual field.  The subtitle here, I hasten to mention, is tongue-in-cheek:  in my mental shorthand that's how I refer to them, simply because they are so close to featureless that only those with an extremely minimalist taste could ever find them appealing.  I could even call it skin photography for fun, as it's been said that photography can only record the surface, the outside of things, but I wouldn't want to mislead the casual and unknowing (but not innocent) web-surfer. 

From an early age I took instinctively to textural photography - I loved the richness of this aspect of nature, whether seen in pristine nature, in the effects of time on man-made objects, or in something in between.  (On my first roll of film ever, at the age of seven, I took a few pictures of the grass at my feet, filling the viewfinder as evenly as I could.  I certainly had never heard the word "homogeneous", but it somehow seemed important to do it this way.)  At some point I took the step of creating my own subjects to photograph, instead of just photographing what I happened to find in the world around me.  What once I found, now I made.

These view camera photographs emerged from a body of non-photographic work, in which sheets of either paper pulp or acrylic medium were built up to incorporate various kinds of dried vegetation and plant matter.  These originals or prototypes are works in their own right:  physical objects, three-dimensional (but thin), mounted and displayed in frames.  I made the photographs as well, simply, to make another kind of thing, to show the rhythms in these surfaces in another way.  But the intention to make photographs was part of the idea from the beginning - they were secondary only in that the objects had to be made first.

Two of my favorite artists (with regard to this approach to making art, in which the imperative seems to be to create a vibrating visual field) have always been Jackson Pollock and Mark Tobey.  The lesser-known (but still quite important) Tobey did intensely calligraphic paintings, though generally small, intimately scaled, in which his spiritual concerns were very evident.

These images exist in limited editions of fifteen signed and numbered prints of any size and any type of print, whether traditional analog silver-gelatin prints or digital pigment prints.  They consist principally of gelatin-silver prints (as they were made when I still routinely made traditional prints and had not yet adopted the use of a digital pigment printer), sized mainly to a format of 16" x 20" or 11" x 14".  Because I generally did not complete the editions in gelatin-silver, I have begun to fill them out with most images by making digital pigment prints in A3Plus, not to exceed a total of fifteen.  For example, of "Acrylic with Spirals and Arcs, Coated I" (id#182-1), I already have seven signed and numbered gelatin-silver prints, and in recent years have made two digital pigment prints, so I can make no more than six additional pigment prints.  

© 2014 Allen Schill.  All rights reserved.  No part of this document may be reproduced or used without prior written permission from the author. Anyone is welcome to link to it, or to quote brief passages, but I would like to be notified.