13 Big Western LandscapesBy Rudy VanderLans
This essay was first published in 2006 in
the accompanying catalog to the exhibition 13 Big Western Landscapes at
Gallery 16, San Francisco.
All art finds its common quality in the
halftone dots that reproduce it. That’s the one sentence
I was able to cobble together that said something meaningful
about the subject of these photographs. “But isn’t
the subject of these photographs the western landscape?”
you ask. Perhaps you’re right. But I’m not sure.
Anyway, I felt the urge to write a clever essay to distract
from the fact that blown up halftone dots are a visual
cliche—except, of course, in the hands of Roy
Lichtenstein and John Baldessari—but that’s a
different story.
What exactly are halftone dots? It’s
a complicated technical issue, but let’s just say that
without the halftone dot it would be difficult to reproduce
images in books and magazines. So they play an important role,
particularly in art. Actually, most people get their first
glimpse of art in printed form—in art books,
encyclopedias, catalogs, and magazines. This means that they
usually see a given piece of art first through the medium of
the halftone dot, which in the case of Roy Lichtenstein’s
work should make you wonder where the original art ends and the
reproduction starts. But again, I stray.
So why use blown up halftone dots when they
carry such baggage? Well, it’s a curious story that
started when my friend Paul, who is a well respected San
Francisco photo dealer, looked at one of my photo books, Pages From an Imaginary Book, and said: “I like these photos but the
reproductions really suck,” or words to that effect. This
struck me as an odd remark because it seemed that Paul was
assuming he was looking at reproductions of traditionally
produced landscape photos. Such photos and their reproductions
have a certain standard to live up to, especially in the mind
of photo dealers such as Paul, and mine fell short by about a
mile.
Paul’s initial reaction to my book of
photos was no big surprise. In the world of art it is common
practice to first produce originals, and then, when desired,
reproduce the work in catalogs, books, invitations, and other
printed materials. Whenever a work of art is reproduced, the
goal is to match the reproduction to the original as closely as
possible. This is never easy; sometimes it's impossible, and it
always requires the expertise of skilled laborers such as
graphic designers, color separators, scanners, and printers.
And in the end, the reproduction is almost always inferior to
the original because the techniques and materials used to
create the originals are usually different from the halftone
dots used in the reproductions.
What Paul was looking at in my book,
however, were not reproductions of originals. And the reason
they didn’t look like the costly reproductions that photo
dealers usually drool over is because the book was designed to
meet very specific production parameters: cheap uncoated paper,
coarse halftone dots, a single color, etc.
See, I was after a particular effect.
Let’s call it “cheap, third-world printing,”
an effect usually avoided in fine art photography books,
particularly the ones dealing with landscape photography. I
wanted to make a comment about the near impossibility of
perfect reproductions and at the same time make a book that had
a unique quality all its own. The photos were processed not to
match an “original,” but to fit the context and
concept of the book. They were scanned, cropped, and printed to
look the way they do on purpose. In that sense the photos in
the book are the originals.
Paul’s honest response to the book
gave me an idea, though. I could turn the relationship of
original and reproduction upside down by making large fine art
prints based on the images in the book, like a Bizarro World
art publishing project. By keeping the halftone dots intact,
and simply enlarging them from the book, I could arrive at a
closer approximation between original and reproduction. I
wasn’t sure what the deeper meaning of this exercise was,
but in the process I would raise all sorts of questions about
representation, expectation, mediation, original, reproduction,
and—let’s not forget—visual cliches. Raising
questions is often all you need to do in art, so I figured I
was on the right track.
That’s how I arrived at these prints.
Somewhere during the process I put together that sentence,
“All art finds its common quality in the halftone dots
that reproduce it,” which sounded just terrific. It
seemed like I was getting at the essence of something. Perhaps
even a perfect justification for using a visual cliche. Then I
was reminded of your question at the beginning of the essay
about the subject of these photographs, and realized that if
you can enjoy these images for what they are, big western
landscapes, that’s fine too.
13 Big Western Landscapes Prints
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Other Essays
13 Big Western Landscapes
By Rudy VanderLans
Ceramics and Type Design: Differently Similar
By Zuzana Licko
El Camino Real
By Rudy VanderLans
File Under Nowhere: The Photo Albums of Rudy VanderLans
By Kenneth FitzGerald
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