¡Colores!; 1937; Photographer Ian Ruhter, Artist Nancy Mooslin, Photographer Roman Vishniac, Installation Artists Stephen Nguyen and Wade Kavanaugh

>>NARRATOR: THIS TIME, ON COLORES! PHOTOGRAPHER AND ALCHEMIST, IAN RUHTER, TRAVELS IN A TRUCK THAT IS ALSO HIS CAMERA INSPIRED BY A 19TH CENTURY PHOTOGRAPHIC PROCESS. HE SHARES HIS EXPERIENCE PHOTOGRAPHING NEW MEXICO. >>Ian Ruhter: When were shooting out in the elements, just a little bit of wind will shake the camera. Nature creates all the beauty but it also gives us the most adversity. >>NARRATOR: ARTIST NANCY MOOSLIN TRANSLATES MUSICAL PIECES INTO PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURES, CREATING AUNIQUE EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE. >>Nancy Mooslin: I developed a way to translate pitch, musical pitch, into color. >>NARRATOR: ONE OF THE 20TH CENTURYS MOST ACCOMPLISHED PHOTOGRAPHERS, ROMAN VISHNIAC, CAPTURES GERMANYS CHANGING POLITICAL REALITY THROUGH A MODERNIST LENS. >>Roman Vishniac: Its an incredible documentation of how quickly

things changed. >>NARRATOR: NEW YORKBASED INSTALLATION ARTISTS STEPHEN NGUYEN AND WADE KAVANAUGH RECREATE THE DENSEMANGROVES AND PLANT LIFE THEY DISCOVERED ON A TRIP TO THE FLORIDA EVERGLADES. >>Wade Kavanaugh: : By exposing ourselves to a different landscape, were trying to extend the language of our work. ITS ALL AHEAD ON COLORES! >>NARRATOR: PHOTOGRAPHER IAN RUHTER USES THE 19TH CENTURY COLLODIAN PROCESS AND TRAVELS SERVES AS HIS CAMERA. COLLODIAN PROCESS AND TRAVELS ACROSS AMERICA IN A TRUCK THAT SERVES AS HIS CAMERA. >> Ruhter: Photography is >> Ruhter: Photography is

a passport to the world. This truck has opened up so many doors, and has allowed me to meet so many people. It is like a big magnet and it brings stories to you. It also gives you an excuse to travel and see the world. The minute I stepped in here it all made sense. Its like, oh of course you built a camera that wouldsee the world up side down and backwards. It really made sense. Up side down is one thing but the backwardness I really understand that because I am dyslexic and its a part of my learning disability or what ever they call it, but it is how I see the world. The pictures that I really like are the ones that make you feel. They are not so much pretty colors or something over the top. They are something that make you feel. Make you feel sad or happy or certain emotion and you dont really know why

but you have that connection with it. Why I chose the wet plate? I think it was out of necessity, because I had been working in the digital medium for a while... they didnt get rid of all the film but Kodak and Fuji and these companies started going out of business and discontinuing film and a piece of me got discontinued at that point.When I learned about wet plate, I learned that I could make my own film. At that point no one couldever take that away from me. It is interesting with photography Ill literally dream about photos and see them in my head. As I am driving down the road its almost like deja vu, where I am like Ive seen that before or this strikes something in me. Thats what I want to photograph. When we are shooting out

in the elements. Just a little bit of wind will shake the camera. Nature creates all the beauty but it also gives us the most adversity and challenges. You have to be patient.Thats the big lesson in photography, being patient. When we travel to a new place, what I like to do is just look at it. Sit there for a couple of days until you can kind of feel it. I think it could take years even, but we dont have so much time. Before you go out and start shooting, you just need to sit there and feel it. Feel the dry desert air blow across you and your lips get dry. Once you feel that you can go out and capture it or absorb it. This one actually worked

out fairly easy. I had looked at it for over a week and had it figured out,we just had to wait on the wind to stop. We showed up at the right time If I ever space travel, honestly, this image I felt like I was on Mars. I live in the Sierra Nevada Mountains where there are all these famous spots, but Ive never seen anything like this. This doesnteven look like the Earth to me. There are limitations on the contrast and everything where that plateau in the back is really washed out but it also creates depth. I dont try to correct those things I embrace them. I think they make them what they are. In life we want to fix

everything, like in society with plastic surgery and Photoshop. We always want it better, better but what is wrong with theway it is? With the way we are? Thats why I like this process cause this is what it is. It is not perfect, but it is perfect. It is better that perfect. One thing that really got my attention is how powerful nature is but the life that exists in it is equally as powerful. This tree has probably been washed out over hundreds of years, I dont know. You can see the roots are stretching out like fingers reaching into the earth still sucking up water. The tree is half dead, but it is also half alive and it will probably be like that for a long time. That one really struck something in me that shows how powerful life is and the will

to survive and live. This house really drew me in because it is kind of like a broken dream. Im sure someone at one pointlived there and had a farm. As time went by it didnt work out. How I make the plates: I sit somewhere in here. We pour the film on top of this plate. The film has iodized salts in it. Pour it onto the plate and float it back and forth to get it on evenly. Then from there, it goes into our silver tank. Silver crystals mix with the iodize and makes a silver halogen.

Thats what makes the plates so reflective. We put the plate on the focusing board and open the lens and expose it to light. Those are the really important components of it, and then you just develop it like traditional black and white photos. New Mexico fits into our process in the west because it reminds me of this open spaces and ruggedness and a do it yourself attitude. Youre out there. The men and women thatwent out there to do this photography in the 1800s they had that spirit. That was something that I missed in photography over the years. It kind of went away. photography or it found me, but I know that it is an important piece of who Iam. The people we meet, I ask questions and end up learning

stuff about myself. You find out you are not alone. Youre not the only one that feels a certain way or looks at the world that way. What inspires me to continue is the thought of having a dream. I think that everyone has dreams, and that is one thing that connect us all as a human race. Without dreams you wouldnt have a reason to get up in the morning. You wouldnt have a purpose or something to go forward towards. Dreams are really important. >>NARRATOR: ARTIST NANCY MOOSLIN SHARES HOW AUDIO IS PHYSICAL BUT FINDS MUSIC TO BE SPIRITUAL AND IMMATERIAL. Nancy Mooslin: Well Ive played Nancy Mooslin: Well Ive played piano all my life and although

I always knew that I wouldnt be a performer - I was too nervous, I wasnt good enough, I wasnt born to be a musician - I knew when I was five I was an artist. The music is a geometric pattern of pitches, intervals of pitch, and the paintings are a geometric pattern of internals of color. And theres a history for this. You know, the 20th century, theres a lot of artists and composers and musicians who see the relationship. From the timeof abstract art, 1914, the first abstract paintings, anybody who had a background in painting and in music, realized that conceptually, they are very connected, very linked. So I was just sort of determined to develop a system to paint the music that I loved and I wanted it to be a system that I could

validate, not just an emotional response to the music, not this is how the music makes me feel. I wanted something I could validate and say this is really what this music looks like. So I developed a way to translate pitch, musical pitch, into color, the meter, the rhythm, is translated into measurement and the actual amount of space something takes up on the canvas or the paper, and then the timbre or the quality of the sound is translated into texture and shape. So I was off and running and Ive been doing this for thirty years. Its never gotten old to me. Ive used the same 88 colors from the piano, you know, theres 88 notes on the piano key board and I use the same 88 colors. I have the same restrictions that an artist or a composer has and yet its not restricting at all. It

opens up a world that can sort of be infinitely explored. But all the pieces could be played. I could go the reverse, I could notate them and somebody could play them. They are all actually representing solid musical ideas. As a physical phenomenon, music is really more solid. A sound wave is actual molecular motion. Its actually something moving through the air, where as what we look at in art is actually the reflected light. What we are seeing is the light reflected off of the painting or the object and that electromagnetic energy is much more ephemeral than sound waves. But I do think that

music is more spiritual.And Ive thought a lot about that. Am I taking something that to me is so spiritual, you know, so immaterial and sort of dragging it down into the physical world, and Ive thought about that a great deal. But its still important to me. Its important to me to sort of drag it down to that maybe the music will be better understood and more approachable and also to bring the art up to the same standard, to bring the painting, the color to that same standard that I hold, where I see music. I want the art to be as spiritual and immaterial >>NARRATOR: THE WORK OF PHOTOGRAPHER, ROMAN

VISHNIAC CAPTURES THE SPIRIT AND SORROW OF THE PREWORLD WAR II JEWISH EXPERIENCE. Maya Benton: My name is Maya Benton Im an adjunct curator of Photographyin New York and we are going to be talking today about the Roman Vishniac retrospective, Roman Vishniac Rediscovered, thats on view until May 5th. Roman Vishniac is responsible for taking the most widely recognized, the most widely reproduced photographic record of Jewish life in Eastern Europe between the two World Wars. Whats unknown is that his work actually spans the early 1920s into the late 1970s. And so this exhibition shows his iconic work and repositions it in a different context, but also really introduces alifes work and I think makes an argument for him being one of the great photographers of the twentieth century. Vishniach was born in 1897 in a town called Pavlovsk outside of St. Petersburg and then he was raised in Moscow and when he was seven years old he was given a camera and a microscope and he became an avid amateur photographer. At the same time

he was an avid student of biology, and chemistry, and zoology. He arrived in Berlin with his with his new wife Luta, who was a Latvian Jewish woman, in 1920. And he quickly joined amateur camera clubs and took to the street documenting this cosmopolitan city and experimenting with Modernism. And in one of the photos you see a train station and it looks like a Fritz Lang stage set. And you see the influence of this Weimar light and shadow play and you see the strong angles and you see the influence of the context in which he was becoming a professional photographer. In one photo theres an image of the polar bears, the famous polar bears at the Berlin Zoo, but it looks like the people are behind bars and this image is quite poignant because shortly after he took the image Jews were prohibited from going to the Berlin Zoo. And shortly thereafter Vishniac started to document the Nazi rise to power in Berlin and this is a body

of work, most of which has never been published. And its incredible documentation of how quicklythings changed, from this very open intellectual cosmopolitan Weimar society, to one where militarism and fascism were closing in. Two images that were often reproduced and published are photos he took of his daughter, Mara, in 1933. In one shes standing in front of a Nazi phrenology shop advertising the superiority of the Aryan race and providing certificates you could say that, you know, I have an Aryan skull and I am indeed an Aryan. And in another shes standing in front of a poster uh of Hindenburg and Hitler and we managed to find the original poster. At the same time he was documenting German Jewish relief organizations. After the rise to Nazi power most Jews were prohibited from practicing professions: from teaching, from being doctors or lawyers, their businesses were boycotted. And so middle class German Jews werestruggling to make a living, to find

food... And so he took photos of middle class soup kitchens, people trying to get emigration visas and he also took photos of Zionist agrarian training camps. Theres a great photo of a boy where hes learning how to milk a cow... There is no cow, so its just this wooden table with the fake udders. These were urban kids from Berlin and they were sent there to really learn how to become farmers so that when they went to Palestine, if they were able to go, they would be prepared. One of the great discoveries is that even in this work that documents relief organizations you see the great modernist impulse. Theres an image of this eggdrawer and it looks like a surrealist image and yet its documenting an agrarian Zionist training camp outside of Berlin. And it shows his versatility and it also shows his compositional acumen. Vishniac was sent in 1935 by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which was the worlds and still is the worlds largest Jewish relief organization, to take photos of poor destitute EasternJews so that those

images could be used to show potential philanthropists in the West... And then the war hit and this became the final photographic record of that world. One of the recurrent themes in Vishniacs iconic work of Eastern Europe is photos of children in basement dwellings. This is because one of the things that the JDC sponsored was summer camps for poor urban Jewish kids. And so he would take photos of kids living in these stifling basement dwellings with very little light and heat; hungry poor children. And then those images would be used to raisemoney for these summer camps Many of these images became quite reproduced... There is a photo of this girl named Sarah, and the image was reproduced on letterhead for an annual fundraising campaign in New York of the JDC. Very few of them were published however, and so bringing together the known work along with the unpublished work

I think argues for him as a great modernist and also helps us to understand the documentary assignment and what he was capturing and to understand the context in which those images were used at the time that they were commissioned. Towards the end of his documentary assignment in Eastern Europe, Vishniac was hired by the Joint, orthe JDC, to make films. Unfortunately the films he made, and he made two of them, were destroyed. But what weve been able to do is slowly piece together outtakes, which were what wound up on the cutting room floor. So weve pieced them together and were showing them here for the first time. And in some cases this its the only known moving footage of these remote Carpathian communities. Living in very rural outposts that you know hadnt been touched by modernity in 400 years. The Vishniac retrospective is up until May 5th, in New York, and I hope that people come to see it and I think there are a lot of surprises in the exhibition. I think for those who are really familiar with Vishniacs iconic work theyre going to be surprised to see fifty years of work ending with hisscientific photomicroscopy. We have a room thats showing his color slides and his microscope and photos

of him working in his scientific laboratories, which most people have never seen before. And I think that for uh young people whove never heard of Vishniac theyre going to walk away with the sense that theyre now familiar with one of the great photographers of the twentieth century. >>NARRATOR: INSTALLATION ARTISTS STEPHEN NGUYEN AND WADE KAVANAUGH CREATED A SURREAL INDOOR FOREST. >>WADE KAVANAUGH: Well my collaborator Stephen and I are doing a project called Drawn from the Everglades. And so its a sitespecific work to this space and to the Everglades National Park. We spent two weeks there through the ARIES residency program, where you actually live in the national park in the park ranger complex. We spent a lot of time cataloging textures, trying to draw impressions.

Hold it. ARIES is Artists in Residence in the Everglades. It was great, it was really mellow. We were coming from the North so to be here and to be in 80degree weather, its pretty incredible. Were doing a number of these projects like this, where well go specifically to one place, especially somewhere new. Artists tend to fall in to their conventions where they do the same thing over and over again, and soby exposing ourselves to a different landscape, were trying to extend the language of our work. So a lot of the times were in a more northern landscape where its somewhat mountainous or theres a richgeologic past. In the Everglades, its flat as a pancake and all of the action as far as biology is really below the surface of the water. So our work, we try to make it happen at the intersection of real

space and imaginary space. And so to have that investigation where youre constantly imagining whats beneath the water and how this little moment of something above the surface translates to, asking yourself what it translates to below the surface really led our inquiry for this project. And so a lot of artists have a model of working where they work in the studio for a number of monthsin preparation, they make something that they have to define the parameters of, and then they recreate those parameters in the gallery to exhibit the work. Steve and I have a much different practice where we go to a site and try to make a work specific to the space. But that means that theres always that element

of potential failure and risk involved. So this is the - the process, you can see, Stephens back there ripping the piece apart, so its much more similar to the process of drawing than sculpture. It was 20 rolls of paper and all of this paper has been textured by putting it in the end of a drill, spinning it and it gets that nice crumpled texture. And then its just, its a lot of manipulation by hand, figuring out what we like. And so weve gotten everything blocked in, we feel really good about how the object is sitting in the gallery. Weve got a lot of material in place and now were, but its relatively static right now. So now were trying to go back into the surface and make it more of adynamic abstraction of what we saw. Ultimately were not wed to the idea of the Everglades, were wedto the idea of making a successful artwork. But one of the things we were really struck by in the Everglades is almost the complete inaccessibility of the place.

So a lot of access is by boardwalk, where youre up above the landscape looking down on it. Or, if youre lucky like we were, you can get taken on a boat ride through the mangroves, but still very dense. And its not like you can go step off the side of the road and walk through the Everglades. Ultimately its about creating an abstract artwork and so some of those, the references to the everglades and the references to the landscape are important to the research phase and now were really just doing what we do. Maybe Ill pull it toward me a little bit, just so its staggered some more. Can you reach that? NEXT TIME ON COLORES! >>NARRATOR: NEW MEXICO PHOTOGRAPHER ROBERT CHRISTENSEN CAPTURES PORTRAITS OF BUILDINGS THAT REFLECT THE RUGGED AND INDEPENDENT SPIRIT OF NEW MEXICO. >>Robert Christensen: Ive photographed an awful lot

of buildings and the ones that look back at me... are the ones that are meaningful. >>NARRATOR: PAPERCUTTING ARTIST ANDREA MARTIN SHARES HOW HER ART PRACTICE IS BASED ON HER BACKGROUNDIN THE SCIENCE OF BIOLOGY. >>Andrea Martin: I look at patterns in nature. Patters in nature really fascinate me. >>NARRATOR: AFTER SOME TOUGH TIMES ARTISAN STEVE CINNAMON IS SAVED BY CREATING AN UNUSUAL MUSICAL INSTRUMENT...THE CIGAR BOX GUITAR. >>Steve Cinnamon: It gave me a feeling of worth, creativity and it was a lot of fun. >>NARRATOR: ARNOLD ALANIZ IS ENAMOURED WITH THE CHANGING SEASONS AND CREATES WORKS REVOLVING AROUND THE EVER CHANGING FOLIAGE AND SCENERY. >>Arnold Alaniz: Ive always tried to convey the feeling of awe and kind of solitude that I get in the scenes that I paint.... UNTIL NEXT TIME, THANK

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