Lot 236: JOANN VERBURG

JOANN VERBURG B. 1950 'POET UNDER WATER' 4 chromogenic prints, flush-mounted to Plexiglas, each with a sequence map and one with a label that is signed, titled, dated, and editioned '2/5' in ink on the reverse, each framed, 2003 (4) Each 16 1/4 by 24 1/4 in. (41.4 by 61.5 cm.)

Acquired from Pace/MacGill, New York

The previous Lot 235, 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, Poet Under Water, 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.