Art making is a problem-solving process . . . and that includes the viewer. In photographing, I am asking people to re-see that which has become invisible.
Catherine Wagner, in Anna Wilkes Tucker, “No-Nonsense Scrutiny in Search of Vernacular Beauty,” in American Classroom: The Photographs of Catherine Wagner (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 1988), 72.
Throughout her career, photographer Catherine Wagner has observed the built environment. Her early series of black-and-white photographs of the Moscone Center in San Francisco during its construction, “George Moscone Site” (1979–82), shows the vastness of the built environment, recalling the sublime topography of nineteenth-century Western landscape photography by Carleton Watkins (1829–1916). Wagner’s images, however, depict a cultural landscape—amid a mess of scaffolding, rebar, dirt, and machinery is the logic of architectural structures that systematize our lives. Identifying models of cultural order inside classrooms, homes, museums, and high-tech labs, she photographs chalkboard drawings in an empty classroom, three-dimensional molecular models in a display case, and marble sculptures in art storage crates. She captures the utilitarian and mundane, a seemingly objective task of documentation, but through her focus and framing her subjects appear far more idiosyncratic. For example, her images from 2003 of vacuum chambers used in physics research are mysteriously anthropomorphic. Their title, Frankenstein, suggests the artist’s critical eye in examining how scientific tools inform our knowledge and ethics—how they shape our society.
Catherine Wagner began exploring the relationship between science and photography in the early 1990s, photographing petri dishes of algae, clone libraries in deep freezers, and tools like beakers and test tubes in scientific labs. In 1997 the San José Museum of Art awarded her the two-year Artist Residency Fellowship to continue her investigation inside Silicon Valley laboratories. Rather than photograph science from the surface, Wagner used a medical imaging device—magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)—in lieu of her camera. “I wondered what it might look like if I was to literally see through matter,” said the artist.1 Her first imaging experiments in the MRI labs at Stanford University were with pumpkins, pomegranates, and onions. Wagner took the digital information and produced photographic images with the cross-sectioned views of their interiors. For Pomegranate Wall (2000), the artist used such images of the pomegranate, which were particularly striking for their resemblance to human cells, repeating them in a pattern throughout a forty-foot arc of backlit images and evoking the organic process of cellular replication on a grand scale.
Catherine Wagner, acknowledgments for Catherine Wagner: Cross Sections (San José, CA: San José Museum of Art; and Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishers, 2001), n.p. ↩︎
Though Catherine Wagner has no formal training in science, her methodologies are similar to the scientific approach of creating knowledge through observation and classification. She typically works with large-format view cameras, as the film size—8 x 10 inches—allows for extremely high resolution, beyond what the human eye can see.1 To move in closer and closer on her subjects, Wagner collaborates with scientific laboratories and uses the scanning electron microscope to create hyperreal images of objects under scientific research. The surface scan of a shark’s tooth in Shark’s Tooth (2000) shows a rich topography—a landscape that is at once real but eerily outside of our sensing capacities.
“Work in Progress: Catherine Wagner’s Flux Density,” Spark, KQED, San Francisco, posted March 25, 2011, video, 9:26 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=wSCPRGyL26g. ↩︎
No matter the subject, Catherine Wagner’s photographs penetrate inner depths. In her work, seeing is both sensation and a philosophical act. “I’m always trying to get at the essence . . . the very core of what I’m looking at,” describes the artist. “I’m always trying to move to that internal structure.”1 Structures, then, can be depicted in the cement foundations of a building, family photographs arranged on a living room wall, student desks in a classroom, and the surface of a shark’s tooth. However, as art critic Bill Berkson wrote of her photographs, “the subjects have a reflexive pitch, as if Wagner’s eye and her camera had set out to rediscover their own intentions,”2 so that despite the everyday character of the subjects themselves, Wagner’s photographs probe an unfamiliar interior—an unseen world.
“Work in Progress: Catherine Wagner’s Flux Density,” Spark, KQED, San Francisco, posted March 25, 2011, video, 9:26 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=wSCPRGyL26g. ↩︎
Bill Berkson, “Catherine Wagner: Fraenkel Gallery,” Artforum, November 1989, 160. ↩︎
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