Jul 21

Jul 21 A CLOSER LOOK AT JOANN VERBURG

Art, Creative People, Culture, Film, Nature, Photography

JoAnn Verburg (b.1950) is an American photographer married to poet Jim Moore, who is often portrayed as reading newspapers or napping in her photographs. Her portraits, still life and landscapes generate a state of prolonged experience. Her methodical process includes the use of diptychs and triptychs that demonstrate how the content of a picture can be enriched by using more than one photograph at a time.

While studying at Ohio Wesleyan University, a friend showed her “The Americans,” a book of photographs shot by Robert Frank while he traveled the country in the mid-1950s. “I had always thought of art as drawing and painting and sculpture,” she said. “It was the first time I realized that photography could be art.” She received a BA in sociology and went for her MFA in Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology. There she interned at the George Eastman House, and was exposed to its stunning collection of 400,000+ photographs.

From 1977 to 1979, Verburg served as the research director and photographer for the Rephotographic Survey Project, traveling throughout the American West to replicate the same wilderness views made by nineteenth-century frontier photographers William Henry Jackson and Timothy O’Sullivan. Then while heading Polaroid’s Visiting Artist Program in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Verburg promoted technical innovation in the photographic field by inviting artists Chuck Close, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, and Jim Dine, among others, to experiment with new large format instant cameras.

Best known for her extraordinary sensitivity to the energy and sensuality of the natural world, Verburg’s photographic work combines exquisite color and thoughtful composition to convey the beauty of its subject and setting. Often presented in diptychs or triptychs her work from the mid-90s onward depicts olive groves in Spoletto, Italy. Verburg has written that when she's working on these photographs, she often torques the image, "squeezing and stretching it . . . into being more lively or wacky."

In her work WTC, acquired by The National Gallery in D.C. the headlines, "The Week in Review," "What Would Victory Mean?" and "The Clamor of a Free People" point to that pivotal event as a moment of profound change for the world. A fantastic interview we found of the artist discussing her newspapers as political portals.

Also her work can also be found in the permanent collections at LACMA, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, etc.

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JoAnn Verburg, WTC, 2003, chromogenic print, image/sheet: 102.24 x 71.76 cm (40 1/4 x 28 1/4 in.),

Charina Endowment Fund,