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June 13, 2009
I know very little about John Wood, an American photographer and printmaker who taught at Alfred University in southern New York from 1955 to 1989, who currently has an exhibition entitled John Wood: On the Edge of Clear Meaning” at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University. It is a retrospective, spanning his career from the early 1960s to the present and is also a a book.
Wood's roots are in the Institute of Design in Chicago, established by the Bauhaus-trained artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and so he consistently challenged traditional photography, often incorporating painting, drawing, and collage as well as cliché verre, solarization, and offset lithography:
Wood “Cooling Tower,” left, and “Cactus,”right,1989
Wood is part of the experimental expressivist American tradition which held photographic description alone would not necessarily unveil the potency of a subject and which stepped beyond the gelatin silver aesthetic or modernist fine print aesthetic and its classical range of tonal values.This tradition, which is centred around subjective expression, imagination, hand-altered, or manipulated photography and constructed photographic images, broke with the modernist dictum that no artistic medium should take on attributes of any other medium.
There is a related exhibition --John Wood: Quiet Protest at the International Center of Photography--- which explores political and social issues of the day through thoughtful photo montage pieces that exist in marked contrast to more traditional documentary photography:
David Wood, My Lai Massacre, ca. 1965
David Levi Strauss in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue says that:
Historically, 'purity' is not a term that has often been applied to the work of John Wood. In photo-historical terms, Wood is thought of as one of those renegades who went against 'pure photography' by incorporating drawing, painting, collage, and every other technique he could get his hands on (not to mention explicit political content), into his practice, thus ushering in the multi media of the 1960s that caused a crisis in 'straight photography.' Long before it became the signal medium of the avant-garde, collage was a folk art, practiced by children, lovers, and grand-mothers.
Strauss adds that from the perspective of our pluralistic present, those once furiously enforced and ferociously defended divisions seem quaint. Today, those and most other boundaries have dissolved and digital imaging has normalized 'impurity' and made the combination and alteration of different kinds of images commonplace.
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