Reviews
Fieldwork
“… This photographer's New York début is smartly understated - modest but memorable.
Dow's images of woods and fields nod to the landscape tradition reaching from Eugène Atget to
Robert Adams, and their quiet beauty is underlined by the richness of her platinum-palladium prints.
Dealing with the overfamiliar subject of man's rude intrusion into the natural world, she's not
always subtle - stacked logs and felled limbs abound - but she knows when to step back and allow an
image to breathe. Her pictures of a lone tree in a row of stumps and a pile of smoking stubble
under a sad gray sky aren't just taken; they're felt."
Vince Aletti, The New Yorker, 12.3.07
“… In 19
monochrome photos of modest landscapes, Minneapolis photographer Beth Dow
meditates on often-overlooked surroundings – small heaps of worksite
gravel that sprawl that sprawl like a ridge of low hills, nets of dead
vines engulfing scrubby river-bottom trees, a circle of immense stones
punctuating a bucolic British landscape, an ancient willow with a broken
limb, bare tree limbs scraping the sky. All of her photos are taken in
what she calls “the precarious seasons of late fall and early spring,
when everything hangs between life, death, and life again.”
Printed on paper coated with a
specially mixed platinum-palladium solution, the images are unusually luminous
and detailed, yet still sketchy. Resembling delicate etchings, they seem truly
drawn with light, which is the original meaning of the word ‘photo-graphy.’ By
finding poetry in such humble, neglected, and utilitarian vistas, Dow affirms
the value and vitality of the ordinary.”
Mary Abbe, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Four Fresh Photo Shows,
5.18.07
“… Beth
Dow’s square platinum prints, despite their serene, monochrome softness,
are similarly ominous. In one, a tangle of desiccated vines covers a couple
of leafless shrubs like a shroud; in another, a pyre of field stubble burns
slowly while its smoke fills the wide sky. In all of these images people
are absent, though their marks are everywhere; this lends them an air of
timelessness and gravitas, and tends to emphasize the gap between humans
and the natural world.”
Joan Rothfuss, Juror and Curator, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Minnesota Center for Photography, Photocentric Catalog,
2005
“What is it we
wish from fieldwork or a field of view? Beth Dow stops short of the romantic
notion of artist above nature and brings an illuminated gardener’s
punctum to its pruning. Despite straightforward appearances, her work teems
with history and philosophy in a comforting, meditative way, like gardens
of the sublime domesticated and available for personal consultation.
Nineteen or so 16” square
plots of palladium printing, with its large tonal range, show patterns not
fully visible to our colored, roving eyes. Dow guides us through space, not
a black and white one, but into grey hovering mists that position our field
of view within them. Perhaps here can be our simple wish: to wonder at the
presence of infinity and singularity.
Led Zeppelin IV was an early
influence, “something ominous”, she said. And it seems this is
the existential drama at the roots of her work. In its cover art a country
man hunched over by a large bundle of sticks props himself up with one: a gesture
of self-assertion. Like many of the gestures recorded in her landscapes, it
shows interdependency between humanity and nature.
Despite the lack of human
figures, signs of devastation and clearing are generally the recognizable point
of the compositions. They interrupt the field and give us a way to consider
our presence’s tenuous hold and its place in the larger presence of nature.
Where we go for sustenance and shelter is also where we go to be buried or
scattered. What we glimpse in it is something both within and beyond our control,
sometimes making it usable, sometimes ominously punctuating the land.
Informed in parts by nineteenth-century
photographer P. H.
Emerson and seventeenth-century gardener William Lawson, Dow composes and
shoots quickly with a hand-held medium-format camera and then crops square:
an instant meditation on both the medium and its metaphysics. This forced geometry
creates visual tension involving the entire frame that doesn’t allow
for wandering off. The viewer’s gaze must find its way through densely
detailed patterns. A glimpse at the road beneath our feet reveals specks of
dirt like the cosmos; a web-fine collection of vines reveals a keyhole shape.
Sometimes these only seem to go so far, but that is their domestic allure:
a center weighted burning stump represents a glimpse both into the beyond and
into a field clearing schedule: sublimity’s horror balanced in the squared
order.”
Sean Smuda, mnartists.org (Walker Art Center/McKnight Foundation),
Complicated Grey Eyes, 5.21.07
In the Garden
“… I
find there is evidence of history throughout these images. There are scenes
and environments in which personal dramas have been played out over time,
and which suggest the imminence of new narratives, both in the photographic
act itself and in the lives of those recorded. Beth Dow’s ethereal,
atmospheric views of English gardens have a stilled timelessness that in
fact is the result of much activity and intention before and after her
exposure of film. The garden themselves are intricately planned, and exist
almost as stages for dramas just completed. The toned and textured light
of her prints results from a meticulous, drop-by-drop formula of platinum
and palladium metals, brushed onto fine paper and dried prior to contact
printing with an enlarged negative.”
George Slade, exhibition catalog
“….
To me, the work in this show that comes closest, as a whole, to embodying
this relatively unmediated state is the group of black and white platinum-palladium
prints by Beth Dow, formal photographs of English palace gardens, some
with classical statuary of such figures as Ceres, or the Dying Gaul, or
urns decorated with sphinxes and leonine grotesques. The very stillness
of these pictures’ subjects quiets down the air around them. Finely
crafted objects in ebonized wood frames, the prints have a slightly warm
vintage cast, the platinum-palladium process embedding the subjects in
a kind of amber.”
Glenn Gordon, mnartists.org: (Walker Art Center/McKnight Foundation),
Rising and Falling to the Occasion,
11.25.05
Vantage Points: Campus as Place
“Beth
Dow is a pictorialist – her technique recalls the nineteenth-century
practitioners who campaigned for the recognition of photography as an artistic,
rather than a merely technical, medium. Dow’s painterly photographs,
although brand new, seem old – capsules from a vague time past, or
projections of the imagination. The artist intensifies what she sees and
photographs through scrupulous editing and extensive but subtle darkroom
manipulations, include cropping and refining of dark and light tonalities.
Although her photographs are shot in black and white, color is subtly present
in the images through toning.
Dow made
extensive use of the Cowling Arboretum (known simply as “the Arb”0,
a distinctive feature of Carleton that provides easy access to nature. With
campus and arboretum maps in hand, she wandered far and wide in order to find
natural sites worthy of a photograph. Sometimes a site’s name – “Druid’s
Den” or “Stone Circle” – revealed its picturesqeness.
Dow also was attracted to an unnamed rustic shelter that grew over the summer
and fall as passersby added sticks, leaves, and grass. By the project’s
end, Dow had named the feature herself: The Fairy Den. Both Dow and Faust capture
a hoary black willow in the Lower Arb. The soft silver tones of Dow’s
photograph give an historical gloss to this particular spot along the Cannon
River.
Some of
the most essential campus places defied easy translation in to pictures. Notably
difficult to Dow was the Bald Spot, which Professor of Art History Lauren Soth
aptly characterized in Architecture at Carleton: A Brief History and Guide: “The
heart of the Carleton campus is not an architectural monument bit a leveled
area of lawn….” With Skinner Chapel as a backdrop, Dow was able
to capture this space as activated by waves of students. The spacing of the
trees suggests the ritual cadence of the passage between class periods.”
Laurel Bradley, essay, Vantage Points: Campus as Place,
Carleton College Press, 2002
“…. As for the campus beyond those windows, pictorialist
Beth Dow uses photography’s power to capture the beauty of valued
places on a foggy morning or during the long shadows of afternoon. Carls
know the Lyman Lakes are beautiful. Dow’s work suggests how complex
and varied this beauty can be throughout the day and seasons. She helps
viewers to understand the transience and endurance that humanizes Carleton’s
landscapes. This interpretation is in keeping with the architectural traditions
of the place. Carleton buildings are never monumental, but designed to
a human scale that does not overpower nature.”
Frank Edgerton Martin, essay, Vantage Points:Campus as Place,
Carleton College Press, 2002