Lot 235: JOANN VERBURG

JOANN VERBURG B. 1950 'UNDERGROUND' 6 chromogenic prints, flush-mounted to Plexiglas, each with a sequence map and one with a label that is signed, titled, dated, and editioned '1/10' in ink on the reverse, each framed, 2005 ( Present Tense , p. 141) (6) Each 21 by 30 in. (53.3 by 76.2 cm.)

Acquired from Pace/MacGill, New York

Underground (2005) was included among sixty works in JoAnn Verburg's mid-career retrospective in 2007 at The Museum of Modern Art, Present Tense: Photographs by JoAnn Verburg. The exhibition's curator, Susan Kismaric, and MoMA's Director of the Department of Photography, John Szarkowski, first met Verburg in 1983 when she brought her photographs to show them. It was her first visit with any curator, and Szarkowski purchased two portraits on the spot. Every few years after that initial meeting, Verburg returned with a new body of work and, over time, the museum acquired ten pieces. Kismaric says that, though the photographs were ostensibly of conventional subjects—portraits, still lifes, domestic scenes, and landscapes—she and Szarkowski realized that these 'seductive images' were 'highly original, unconventional, and technically superb.' They are essentially about the way photographs can articulate and multiply time—what Kismaric calls the 'in-between of what has just happened and what will happen next' (interview with Mason Riddle, 2008).

Working in Spoleto, Italy, Minnesota, and Florida, Verburg has created multi-part photographs since the 1980s. She uses a 5-by-7-inch camera and, since 1990, only color film, planning her photographs as carefully as a director prepares storyboards for film. Verburg keeps a journal, constantly sketching what interests her, as a painter might. In preparation for her early-morning or late-afternoon shooting, she practices placement of the camera's tripod to achieve the desired focal plane in order to strategically render areas in-focus and others out-of-focus. Using tracing paper, Verburg traces the horizon line on the ground glass for the first image in a series so that she can align the subsequent exposures quickly and efficiently. As a result, each image can stand on its own as a fully realized photograph. The near-life-sized rendering of her subjects in the images is deliberate, serving to maximize the viewer's engagement.

As in the present print, and the subsequent Poet Under Water (Lot 236), the photographer's husband, the poet Jim Moore, is a frequent, often-sleeping subject. The recurring use of newspapers—only those published on the days the images are taken—reminds us that there is a violent, out-of-balance world outside the frame. In her review of the MoMA retrospective for the January – February 2008 issue of Frieze magazine, Kristin M. Jones writes,

'Verburg has clearly been influenced by the proto-cinematic quality of Giotto's dramatic scenes in their serial frames—his incorporation of time, sometimes by cutting off figures at the edges to suggest movement beyond the frame—and his affecting facial expressions, reverence for nature and emphasis on balance and clarity. Sleeping models in other works echo Renaissance Deposition paintings, just as her glowing multiple panes in colour photographs evoke altarpiece panels. In Underground (2005) a man dozing on a park bench—who appears to be her husband, the poet Jim Moore—stretches across the bottom of two Cibachromes; dead leaves fill a pair of photos above; and in two further images at the top, a stone wall and buildings are viewed through areas of sharp and soft focus. In this quietly moving work the figure lies beneath leaves and stones as though interred, or weighed down by an earthly reality at once tangible and dreamlike.'