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Volume II
Issue 9 January 2000
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by Meryl Joseph This portfolio represents my personal and long-term search to explore photographic imagery as a window to the unconscious, to the mystery behind reality, rather than reality itself. To me, a photograph is a pathway to enter myth, inviting the viewer to take a journey into the ancient cave, to find the language of the soul. Early in my career, after an intense period of study at the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, Italy, the artists' sketch books and drawings for the Renaissance frescoes inspired me to seek spontaneity in darkroom methodology. In the Fifteenth Century sketchbooks, it was freedom of gesture, use of shading, and experimentation with form that propelled me to use the photographic negative as a template for re-interpretation. I began to layer images, creating translucent narratives that summon the viewer into the photograph, as if entering a dream. The stories suggest another world, another time. The narration is fictive, open to interpretation, invoking exploration, adventure. This impulse - to inspirit the traditionally sacrosanct territory of the negative - evolved into a career mission to bring movement and motion into the still image; to use the enlarger as a paint brush to explore abstraction and chiaroscuro; to attenuate line and shadow by expanding the range of gray and black tonality. These surface alterations render each print unique. The evolution of my work has resulted in a thematic thread of kineticism in the image, (mostly with figurative themes); large grids; scrolls; frescoes, progressing to an integration of three-dimensional projections as theater design, to the moving image on film - both narrative and documentary - all informed by the photographic film plane. The original photographs were created without any reliance on contemporary technology. The method is purely photographic, using basic darkroom chemistry.
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About the Author:
Meryl Joseph is a native New Yorker. In 1969, after study in Florence, she began the photographic career that evolved into filmmaking and theater design. Selected solo exhibitions include Humphrey Gallery (Soho, NYC), Berkshire Museum (Pittsfield, MA), Nikon House (NYC) and Hanna Diehl Gallery (Cologne, Germany). Ms. Joseph produced and directed Desert Silk; City Farmers, and Into the Mainstream. Mainstream was featured on Nickelodeon and The Learning Channel and garnered a Cine Golden Eagle Award. City Farmers (score by Jack DeJohnette) premiered at Amerika Haus (Berlin) and was screened at the Museum of Natural History (New York City); Sierra Club Film Festival (NYC); National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, DC); American Cinematheque (Los Angeles), and Okomedia Ecological Film Festival (Freiburg, Germany). Published photography includes Who Won Second Place At Omaha? (Random House); Ismail Merchant's book, Indian Cuisine; The New York Times, New York Magazine, Food & Wine; themes about Cesar Chavez/The United Farm Workers; André Gregory's Alice In Wonderland. In addition to directing a Berlin production of The Burning Desert Wind, based on the literature and paintings of Else Lasker-Schüler, Ms. Joseph has created production design and lighting for: the St. Louis Opera Company; Spoleto Festival, Charleston; Cinderella, (directed by James Ivory); Manhattan Theatre Club (New York City); Lucille Lortell's White Barn Theatre. She is currently a production manager and lighting designer for Arts4All. Ltd. [the Publisher of this Newsletter - Ed.] Ms. Joseph will soon be directing her first feature film, Stolen Goods, based on a play by Diane Kagan and starring Barbara Meek.
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