California Museum of Photography | UCR Center for the Arts
STRATUM
The photographs in Stratum are “banquet” photographs, made between 1920 and 1950 at gatherings of employees, tradespeople, or professional organizations as souvenirs for the participants. Because these photographs were made with large negatives, often the size of the final print, extraordinary detail lets us easily observe individuals as they clown around or pose seriously for the camera, frozen in revelry or pensive, and giving a sense of both the individual and the collective.
Clive Wearing’s Dilemma
The works in this exhibition are twelve large unaltered black and white gelatin silver photographs produced by John Divola in 1990. Shown in its entirety for the first time, this body of work invokes the vocabulary of the sublime and the universal—clouds, cosmos, atmosphere. Yet, the means involved are nothing more than throwing handfuls of flour at sloppily painted backdrops.
