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from Stanford Magazine, February, 2003
Beauty and the Beam
Scanner art shows nature in a new light.by Marguerite Rigoglioso
YOU'RE STARING AT A LARGE, 2-D image of a silvery ball suspended in velvet blackness. Nipple-like protrusions and snaky lines meander over its surface. Is it a piece of jewelry, some ornamented vessel created by a metalsmith, a particle illuminated by an electron microscope?The title of this work won’t help: Darkness U. You’re pretty much on your own unless you ask its creator, Doris Mitsch. “It’s the skeleton of an actual sea urchin,” she says.
Welcome to the moody, mysterious world of Mitsch’s digital-scanner photography. It’s a place where organic forms such as flowers, shells and sea creatures can be seen for what they really are: universes unto themselves, with hills and canyons, wrinkles and folds, spirals and curves, even veins and flesh. “My images of flowers are probably pretty close to what insects would see—and aren’t insects the ‘audience’ that flowers are actually intended for?” Mitsch asks mischievously.
The artist photographs her subjects in an ingenious but simple way. She places them on an ordinary flatbed digital scanner (keeping the top open), draws the curtains in her cheerful, red-walled San Francisco studio, envelops herself in darkness and starts scanning away, carefully positioning and repositioning the items to capture them from unusual angles. “There’s a meditative pace to making these images that I really enjoy and that I think comes across in their viewing,” observes Mitsch, ’87.
After transferring the digital files to her computer, she tinkers with them slightly, using Photoshop software to elicit the kinds of shading effects that photographers ordinarily seek in the darkroom printing process. Mitsch burns a CD for each image and takes them to The LightRoom, a digital photo shop in Berkeley. There, owner Rob Reiter helps her print the images with archival inks on high-end paper. As the printer spits out the images, eight different ink jets pass over the paper, producing a rather soppy piece that requires careful drying with a portable heater. “This is to prevent the ink in the dark areas from bleeding too much into the lighter areas,” she says. “That’s one of the biggest challenges.”
The prints, ranging from 14 inches square to 40 by 32, are technically classified as photographs but appear as much more; they have the lush, almost three-dimensional quality of pastels. “That comes from the heavy, textured watercolor paper I use, which gives them an inky, matte surface that you can’t get with traditional photo paper,” Mitsch explains. Their almost spooky glow is a result of the scanner’s beam sweeping over the object in complete darkness, illuminating some areas brightly and trailing off mistily around the edges.
Mitsch’s work thus has the effect of not only recording nature but subtly improving upon it. She typically portrays a single subject as several different entities in a series by varying the scanning angles. Laying an Iceland poppy on its back, for example, produces an unusual dorsal view in which the flower’s petaled essence is clearly identifiable. But by scanning it topside down, Mitsch probes its delicate interior, creating an image that could be mistaken for sumptuous red satin. “I’m interested in exploring what beauty is, how it works and what makes shapes beautiful to the eye,” she says.
...Seeing the results, her Stanford friend Serena Wellen suggested that Mitsch contact the ClampArt gallery in New York, where Wellen, ’88, exhibited her own photography. In the spring of 2001, gallery owner Brian Clamp agreed to take some of Mitsch’s images on consignment, and it wasn’t long before they began to sell.
“Mitsch is at the forefront of a new way of making photographic images,” says Clamp. “She’s also pushing photography into a more painterly realm that’s reminiscent of Georgia O’Keeffe. Her work is not only beautiful but critically significant.” Clamp says he knows of 10 or 20 others across the country using the new medium, though none so well as Mitsch, in his view.
During the past 18 months, Mitsch has participated in more than 12 group shows, some featuring renowned photographers like Robert Mapplethorpe, Imogen Cunningham and Karl Blossfeldt. Her first solo show, at ClampArt, runs from January 30 to March 29. She will also be represented at the 12th International Los Angeles Photographic Print Exposition January 16 through January 19 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.
