City:
Santa Barbara, CA
Image: Doug Busch, Money to Loan, Girl (2) Guys, Denver, 1986. Silver chloride contact print. Private Collection.
Having served as an assistant to Ansel Adams and Al Weber, Douglas Busch mastered the craft of large format photography, and like his mentors, he focused his lens on the landscape. In 1986, however, he launched “The Denver Photographic Project,” taking his large-format cameras into the city to capture both the people on the street and the architecture of the Western metropolis.
Busch's large format black and white photographs, taken with a large camera that the artist designed and built himself, are images of great subtlety and irony. Through a combination of Busch’s photographic sensibility and his impeccable technique, the ordinary is raised to a monumental scale. The 31 street scenes presented in this exhibition open our eyes to the beauty and subtlety of the everyday. Ranging in scale from 8x20” to 20x24”, the images are Busch’s attempt to “record reality more accurately than I can actually see it.”
Using an unwieldy instrument that weighs over 100 pounds to make street portraits was an extremely uncommon practice, and the photographer mused that more than a few people mistook the 20x24” camera for a popcorn machine. Roaming the city over the course of one year, Busch produced hundreds of images with his large cameras. Busch’s architectural photographs are rendered in exquisite detail, the large-scale negatives providing crispness and clarity, as well as an unsurpassed range of tones from white to black. Every brick is discernible in the Electric Building (1986), even in night light.
Similarly, in his photographs of people – with subjects ranging from street vendors to circus performers, everyone formally posed in their working environment―the wealth of details penetrate a mere façade and suggest the deeper character of the subjects.
The Santa Barbara Museum of Art is a privately funded, not-for-profit institution that presents internationally recognized collections and exhibitions and a broad array of cultural and educational activities as well as travel opportunities around the world.
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State Street, Santa Barbara, CA.
Open Tuesday - Sunday 11 am to 5 pm. Closed Monday.
805.963.4364 www.sbma.net
Contact Information:
Contact: Katrina Carl
(805) 884-6430
kcarl@sbma.net
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