Untitled (Governor of Ohio Judson Harmon), Damaged series

2003 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
33 x 48 cm

Lisa Oppenheim

year born: 1975

gender: female

nationality: American

The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material. For this project, Oppenheim procured the original glass negatives, which had been damaged over time, from the archives of this newspaper. She then printed the negatives as is, highlighting the multitude of physical flaws that had ‘spoiled’ the negatives. Pairing these distorted and decaying images with their original newspaper captions, the abstracted images and specificity of the texts collide, opening up the imagery to new and imagined interpretations. Struggling towards clarity, the patterns and forms contained within the images are only defined by the positive and negative (black and white) spaces of the compositions. For example, Untitled (Ruby Downing Sitting Between Two Unidentified Men in a Room) depicts an amorphous congregation of pools and splotches. With the context muddied by time, the detailed caption provokes questions and considerations concerning the protagonists and context of the imagery—who is Ruby Downing? What room? Why was this a newsworthy event? Similarly, Untitled (Joseph T. Robinson Standing at a Podium in a Room) presents only a frenetic constellation of almost pixelated spots, like static on a screen. While, Untitled (Governor of Ohio Judson Harmon) illustrates a fluid, almost gaseous ball of energy, like a fire set ablaze. Embracing the physical erasure of the content, Oppenheim’s project underscores how temporal distance changes the interpretations of a historical event, while also demonstrating how what is considered newsworthy shifts over time.

Lisa Oppenheim’s artistic practice is rooted in a research-based methodology that focuses on the intersection of images, their sources, and their contexts. Working predominantly in photography, the artist frequently references library, collection, documentary, and online archives as resources for her projects that are marked by both their conceptual and aesthetic complexity. Visually, her images embrace fragmentation, exposures, substitutions, and other physical manipulations that reveal the nuanced mechanics and chemistry of the photographic medium, its history, and theory. Merging strategies of appropriation and recontextualization, Oppenheim reconstitutes past and present by assigning new meanings to historical imagery, records, and materials. Bound up in the expansiveness of photography’s trajectory, Oppenheim’s project consider the process, modes of consumption, and circulation of photography.