Linda Connor`s photographs map an odyssey around the world but mirror a universal spiritual journey of interwoven times and cultures.
Connor has traveled to places as far-flung as India, Ireland, the Peruvian Andes and the American Southwest in pursuit of still lifes, landscapes and portraits that manifest an often mystical bond between human beings and nature.
She has pursued them across two decades and across mountains and deserts, lugging an 8-by-10-inch view camera.
”The work keeps growing, moving out from the center,” Connor says. But it moves inward as well, toward a center of being.
Thus the title ”Linda Connor: Spiral Journey, Photographs 1967-1990” is a fitting one for her midcareer retrospective opening Friday at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. It includes 110 of Connor`s black-and-white toned prints.
Connor`s photographs-of ancient ceremonial caves, of rocks carved with mythical figures, of ruins rising into the mists, of a Buddha that appears as one with the roots of trees enfolding it-reflect her signature approach to intertwining themes about nature, culture and sacred ground.
”Connor has often been called a landscape photographer, and though a profound connection to the natural world is manifested in her work, the term falls short in describing it,” writes critic Rebecca Solnit in the introduction to the exhibit book (”Linda Connor: Spiral Journey,” Museum of Contemporary Photography, $25). ”To be a landscape photographer has a prerequisite: to define the landscape as a distinct and separate subject. Connor has photographed the land as part of the continuum of being, and her work is centered upon the territory in which the human and the natural connect and where cultures have connected with the sacred.”
Museum director Denise Miller-Clark, who curated the show, writes in her preface to the book: ”I first came to know the breadth of Linda Connor`s work through a slide presentation. As I listened to the tantric choir of the Gyoto monks, I watched the images dissolve, echo and resonate. . . . Each new image retained a remembrance of the previous one, added meaning and suggested interconnectedness.”
The prints themselves suggest a realm of impressions recalled from a dream. Mood and method are one: The luminous planes of these contact prints seal into place slowly as sunlight pours through Connor`s large-format negatives onto printing-out paper.
”It`s more like baking than serious darkroom work,” Connor says. ”You peek in and hopefully you pull it in time. Some are quite long exposures, depending how bright the sun is, what time of year it is and how dense the negative is.” The typical exposure time is 10 to 40 minutes.
Connor can convey cosmic spaces with a photograph of a floating leaf and can whisper of a life force with ancient drawings etched into impenetrable rock. In her studies of hands and feet, skin is translucent, sculptural and as fluid as the waterfall cascading downward like a spill of thick cream in another Connor photograph.
Her portraits-lyrical compositions that still evoke the candid energy of street photography-show the dignity of her subjects and the mix of curiosity and reserve flowing on both sides of the camera.
Whether she photographs stone columns standing sentinel at a ruin in Yucatan, Mexico, or armchairs standing sentinel in a room in Yosemite, Calif., Connor suggests an elusive human drama where the offstage actors still exert a palpable presence. The cross-references, the cultural refrains echo everywhere, fusing what is seen with the lingering whisper of what remains unseen.
Connor`s familiar photographs of rock art, or petroglyphs, eloquently express both a literal and a metaphorical sense of a human mark left on the land. She has found and photographed petroglyphs in places as distant as Nepal and Utah, carved there by tribal civilizations.
In ”Marks in Place,” a book that includes her work, she described her response to experiencing the drawings for the first time in a canyon near Prescott, Ariz. ”The canyon surrounded me. I felt the presence of those who had made the marks and the independent vibrancy of the drawings,” she wrote. ”The spirals and marks were weathered and seemed as much a part of the canyon as the stars in the night sky.”
Her photographs evoke the aura of reverence and power surrounding these places and resonate with Connor`s own sense of discovery. For all their mystery, the drawings of spirals, animals and human figures speak easily down the ages of myth, of irrevocable bonds between human beings and nature, and of an ancient search through the supernatural for a kinder destiny.
”I`m not a scholar on these things, but I guess I do go toward the universal,” Connor says. ”I often run into people who are vehemently opposed to that idea. They feel it`s imperialistic and disempowering to other cultures. But it seems to me that all people have a desire to come to grips with being in this universe. They have these spiritual and religious strategies, and I think those sacred forms are universal.”
She expresses concern, however, over the proliferation of interest in rock art and the way her photographs may be adding to that interest. ”Now there`s a footpath beaten into the ground to some of them. It`s like telling a friend about the fishing village in Mexico and suddenly there`s a Club Med there,” she says.
Connor says she hopes to inform a society bent on dominating the Earth about other ways of linking to it. ”The Paleolithic cave drawings are just as good as a home computer. I like hot showers. There are lots of things around us I approve of. But Styrofoam cups-do we really need Styrofoam cups?”
Connor, 45, was born in New York. She studied with photographer Harry Callahan at the Rhode Island School of Design and took documentary
photographs. She came to Chicago as a graduate student at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology during the tumultuous era of the late 1960s, and that proved seminal to a new approach to her work.
”It was the hostility of the city-the weather and the riots-that made me do that inward work,” she says. She began creating incongruous and mood-laden juxtapositions of photographs within photographs, drawings and posed settings. She used portraits from family albums, pictures of strangers and her own work, underscoring the immense power of photographs as vehicles of heritage and nostalgia.
Connor says the work explored both the visual vernacular of photography and her personal responses to being an adopted child.
Several of these photographs are on exhibit along with pictures from the 1970s, when she worked with an old 8-by-10 view camera equipped with a pictorial soft-focus lens that had belonged to her great-aunt. The camera cloaked the world in a dreamlike veil. In 1979 Connor published ”Solos,” a monograph of pictures taken with the camera. After that, she worked with a sharp-focus lens but her symbiosis of light and composition maintains the lyrical, shimmering quality that transcends specific facts of time and place. Connor teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute. She has lectured and taught numerous workshops elsewhere. Her many awards include grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1976 and 1978 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979. She was named photographer of the year by the Friends of Photography in 1986. Her work has been widely exhibited, including an exhibit of the petroglyph photographs at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1988.
Her odysseys continue, and she is planning a trip to Turkey for May and June. ”For the believer, a sacred site is the center of the world, the end of the journey; for Connor, each site is a center, and the journey has pauses but no end,” writes Solnit in ”Spiral Journey.”
What: ”Linda Connor: Spiral Journey, Photographs 1967-1990”
Where: Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago, 600 S. Michigan Ave.; 663-5554
When: Friday through May 30; 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday, noon-5 p.m. Saturday
How much: Free
