The title of the exhibition, FLORIDA PHOTOGENESIS: THE WORK OF CREATIVE AND EXPERIMENTAL PHOTOGRAPHERS IN FLORIDA, may indeed be too broad, for as with it's underground rivers there are many different streams of photography that have arisen in Florida. There have certainly been many fine artists/teachers supported by the state university system who have used photography as their creative means. There were of course those who used the medium in the straight tradition; however if we look at the work of artists in the academic institutions, we can see that there was a particular group of artists / photographers, beginning with Van Deren Coke's presence at the University of Florida in 1958, and extending to Florida State University and the University of South Florida,who were committed to very different agendas than those held by more traditional photographic artists. Although urban avant garde art centers such as Chicago and Los Angeles offered support for such experimental activities, in the southeast only the academic institutions in Florida were actively supporting artists who were stretching the boundaries of photography.

In this text I want to lay out lines of thought about creative and experimental photography as manifest by the artists included in this show. Additionally the obvious photogenetic swapping that has occurred among the group should be evident.

VAN DEREN COKE The University of Florida,1958-1961

In the late 1950's, when Van Deren Coke came to Florida the classic American modernist model of what a photograph should look like was highly developed, i.e., black and white, continuous tone, great depth of field, objects in focus from the front to the back of the picture plane. The work was usually done with an 8"x10" view camera to yield an image of the highest resolution possible with the use of a normal lens . All this was in reaction to the pictorialist movement in photography, which had favored tone and form over high resolution. Pictorialism, highly popular in America up until the late 1930's,was in fact an obvious attempt to emulate many of the qualities of late nineteenth century painting and thus was anathema to modernist critics who wanted to free photography from the past. As a teenager, Coke had driven to the West Coast to meet Edward Weston,who was at that time the acknowledged leader of the modernist school of photography.Weston took a liking to him and invited him stay for several weeks.Coke also met Ansel Adams and others and began collecting their work. Having grown up in Lexington, Kentucky, the son of a successful hardware store owner, he involved himself in the Lexington Camera Club, a group of people seriously interested in photography as a fine art. He was a friend and teacher of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, whose work, a sort of Southern Gothic vein of imagery, was akin to the work of New Orleans photographer Clarence John Laughlin. This work is now largely forgotten, but it influenced a number of younger photographers such as Wallace Wilson, Robert Fichter and Jerry Uelsmann when it appeared in Aperture,the only serious publication about American photography at that time . Coke, though deeply schooled in the modernist tradition, supported the opening up of the language of photography to encompass many other variations. Although Edward Weston and Ansel Adams were his early teachers and mentors, his interactions with Man Ray in Paris in 1960 encouraged him to experiment with a greater freedom in his printmaking. He searched for a method of escaping the excessive reality of the photograph. Tom Barrow, in an introduction to a 1981 exhibition of Coke's early work, quotes the artist's statement on the development of his working methods:"Through experimentation, I found that flashing on a white light in a darkroom while the print is still in the developer gave me an image that was allusive and mysterious but not completely divorced from a feeling of reality - a feeling that was a very necessary ingredient for me." Coke had been hired to teach in the Department of Art at the University of Florida by Clinton Adams, one of America's pioneer lithographers,who had a printmaker's sympathy for photography. Printmakers at that time were only slightly higher on the art community's social scale than were photographers. Before arriving in Florida,Coke had been mentored at Indiana University by Henry Hope, an urbane art historian, who dealt with international art issues for UNESCO. Although still working very much in the modernist vein, Coke showed evidence of change in his personal work;he might speak of surrealism but in muted tones. Later in the1960's, these changes became much more blatant, with flashing of light on prints during developmment, the use 19th century found negatives along with his own, etc. Coke's major publication, The Painter and the Photograph(1964), examined the relationships that painters had with photographic source material. It appeared at a time in which there was great denial in the painting community about the use of photographs. Coke's book documented with side by side illustrations how painters had used photography since its invention. At the University of Florida, Coke taught photography and art history. Shortly after Coke's arrival, Clinton Adams left to direct the Tamarind Institute in Los Angeles and then was hired to be the Dean of the School of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico. He called Coke to come to New Mexico to head the Department of Art and start a photography program. Before he left Florida, Coke hired Jerry Uelsmann to teach photography and design at the University because he liked what he saw in Uelsmann's portfolio: great technical skills and a budding sense of surreal poetic vision based on subtle manipulations (such as multiple printing by means of blends and negative sandwiches ) that went beyond the borders of the modernist straight photograph.

JERRY UELSMANN The University of Florida,1960-1997

Jerry Uelsmann espoused a postvisualization concept which was in reaction to Ansel Adams' previsualization theory. Adams held that if one learned one's craft in a highly methodical fashion and developed one's negatives correctly, then it was possible to previsualize what the final print would look like in terms of tones. That attitude continued and reinforced the dominant photo ideology that the camera worker is locked in a direct relationship to any given moment in time. Uelsmann's concept of postvisualization was that photographers could be released to create their own time and space. Coke had brought high modernist photography to Florida; Uelsmann brought surrealism, a struggling form of modernism, and his students brought postmodernism to the scene. Uelsmann encouraged his students to experiment with image making in the broadest ways: in focus, out of focus, multiple exposures, time exposures, new surfaces, etc. As a student studying with Uelsmann, I was once asked by another student,"Don't you think photography is too limited by its means?" That seemed a strange question to me. The concept of photography laid out by Uelsmann was that of an experimental art form that transcended the single frame boundary and in fact was just another mark making means for the artist. This concept was influenced by the teaching of Henry Holmes Smith, a leading theoretician of progressive thought in creative photography. Uelsmann had met Smith at Indiana University, after studying at the Rochester Institute of Technology with Minor White and Ralph Hattersly; so he was not some naive "photo-techie" when he ended up in one of Smith's graduate classes. It may be helpful at this point to take note of some of Smith's history. In Chicago, Smith had worked for Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, who was directing the Chicago Institute of Design(the"New Bauhaus"); and he had found Moholy-Nagy's modern radical attitudes toward photography much to his liking. Smith was soon setting up a darkroom and teaching color photography for him at the Institute; therefore Smith brought a rather Bauhausian attitude to his teaching at the University of Indiana and fused it with an American sensibility for the poetics of imagery. Influenced by the writings of I.A. Richards, Smith taught his students how to look at photography by "learning to read a photograph." Henry Holmes Smith's Zen master question,"What should a photo look like?" opened Jerry Uelsmann to the active poetic mind. Once during a conversation with Smith, Uelsmann ridiculed a multiple print done by a well known Chicago experimental photographer, and Smith challenged him to try the method himself before he so easily dismissed it. In the darkroom Uelsmann found that his brilliant, comedic associative thought processes could blend images in ways that allowed him to make symbols about the human condition. Such constructs yielded signs with which to make metaphors. Beaumont Newhall, the director of the George Eastman House Museum and a leading photographic historian, was at first appalled by Uelsmann's blends and perceived him as a resurrection of Oscar G. Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson, two nineteenth century "art photographers" who used similar techniques and who had been consigned to the dust bin of history by Newhall. The years following Uelsmann's first publications, however, were those of the blooming of the postmodernist photo esthetic; and Newhall soon came to see Uelsmann's blended images, which retained deep Renaissance perspective while breaking the time frame of the high modernist canon, as real photographs. Uelsmann in fact today seems closely related to the Surrealists and to the Pre-Raphaelite painters in his constructed metaphoric search for meaning. When Uelsmann left Indiana to teach at the University of Florida, the big boom of interest in photography was occurring all across the country. During his first year at Florida, he was assigned to teach a design class as well as an introduction to photography. His great comic charm and the presentation of a simple photographic method (2 1/4 format cameras, using slow black and white film to achieve fine quality 8x10 prints with available light) allowed his students to accomplish excellent results without the traditional struggle to master a 4x5 view camera with all its trappings (dark cloth, tripod, film holders, studio lighting). His teaching was also characterized by insights into the history and criticism of photography; he encouraged a sense of inquiry that drew from the best of Henry Holmes Smith's concepts about creative photography and that was augmented by his own provocative, amusing and irreverent thoughts. Quickly his classes filled to overflowing so that he was soon teaching only photography. He aggressively courted the New York photo media establishment; his Christmas cards went out to everyone of any importance in the photo world and they quickly became collectors' items, as his vision seemed to strike many chords. For although Uelsmann used abandoned nineteenth century photographic art practices such as multiple negatives in creating single prints in the manner of Rejlander and Robinson, he did such a skillful job of creating his visual fables using Renaissance perspective principles that his images moved directly into the American psyche. Although Uelsmann's esthetic intention was unique and quite different from that of Ansel Adams, his work shares, oddly enough, some of Adams' characteristic strengths, i.e., beautiful clarity of focus, unbelievable depth of field and detailed backgrounds. Uelsmann broke the time honored photographic relationship between time and space. Although he does not directly use any digital technology in his work, he is seen by many to be the Leonardo da Vinci of Photoshop.

EVON STREETMAN Florida State University,1964-1971, The University of Florida,1978-1999

Evon Streetman, who received her art training at Florida State University, returned from a stint in New York working as a professional photographer to open a portrait studio in Tallahassee. Her technical control of the medium and her ability to make portraits of striking intensity soon made her a recognized leader in the field . She was asked by the Chair of the Art Department at Florida State University to create a photography course. She began attending national photographic conferences about creative photography and soon realized that she had a whole set of artistic talents that could be applied to the making of photographs that transcended the traditional.She began to use a variety of non-silver processes; then she moved on to painting with air brush on color prints, increasing the scale of the images as she went along. In addition to setting up a photography program at FSU, Streetman started a photography program at the Penland Crafts School in Penland, North Carolina,to be held during the summers. In 1971 she was invited to move to Penland on a full-time basis. She went to North Carolina and remained there until she got a phone call from Jerry Uelsmann asking her to teach at the University of Florida in 1978. Streetman offers the following artist's statement which clearly articulates her ideas and work methods: "Most of my work uses the landscape as a subternatural basis and usually posits two or three layers of intentions. This begins with a blatant interest in the beauty of natural things and then moves to the second layer which deals with an emotional response born from my most precious memories of a rural childhood. This fecund ecology of the thirties, now more and more, only exists in my memory. The third layer is the intellectual analysis of that space, the picture as an object and the formal treatment of the picture plane with the blending of totally photographic information and totally imagined information. This pastiche of real and invented subject is a subterfuge that hopefully will please and confuse the viewer in a way that highlights questions about our conceits of observation in every respect. In the intervening time between pictures and fishing, this all provides a visual RUBRIC'S CUBE for my brain while I watch the referent slowly disappear."

Streetman is a great Southern storyteller in both her pictures and in her classroom. She offers us a rich legacy. During her long career she has worked through a variety of methods and techniques. In every instance her strong sense of being emerges and engages us in a wonderful way.

DOUGLAS PRINCE The University of Florida,1968-1976

Douglas Prince joined the faculty of the University of Florida in 1968, a time when both the student population and the demand for photography had increased. Prince's early training had been based in the tradition of straight photography, but he had soon felt the restraints of the single straight image and for one of his undergraduate exhibitions hung "pieces of weathered wood, rusty metal and wire, old gloves and dead birds". In 1965, he was introduced to orthographic film, used in the printing industry to record high contrast information but which can be processed to yield a continuous tone positive image, a transparent photograph. He began making photo sculptures and in his graduation exhibition he "put together a show which consisted of photo-sculptures with layers of film (some with mirrored surfaces), film overlays, several different types of stereo constructions, images with parts animated by electric motors and prints of multiple-negative blends." Arriving at the University of Florida to teach the undergraduate beginning classes, Prince found an open environment in which he could continue to explore the widening form of photography. He refined his early experiments by taking photography into three dimensions. He consolidated his means and materials, producing exquisite 6' x 6" boxes of Plexiglas and film transparencies. His flat prints, blended images, might be seen in the umbra of Uelsmann's prints , but the boxes allowed him to step into an arena of his own. They draw upon the same psychological sources as his blended imagery but play more directly with the real world. The fact that he was exposed to the work of Jack Nichelson, a fellow faculty member, could only help his development. Nichelson, who had also studied with Henry Smith at Indiana at the same time as did Uelsmann and who had joined the faculty at the University of Florida at the same time Uelsmann had, chose to set aside his interest in photography and follow his interest in Joseph Cornell's three dimensional worlds. He has subsequently created a distinctive body of work, exquisitely crafted, utilizing found objects and imagery in a box format. This could only have increased Prince's confidence in creating his own small worlds.

OSCAR BAILEY The University of South Florida, 1969-1985

Oscar Bailey established the photography program at the University of South Florida in 1969. When hired by Donald Saff to teach photography at the University of South Florida, Bailey was already a well known photographer. In his early days he had been an admirer of the work of Edward Weston and Minor White. In 1962 he attended one of Henry Holmes Smith's teaching conferences at Indiana University;out of this meeting the Society for Photographic Education was created the next year in Rochester, N.Y. and became the networking institution for American art photographers. Bailey started using a wide-format banquet camera in 1967; this was an antique camera with a spring- driven gear system that moved the lens of the camera producing images up to 60 inches in length. The panoramic (180 degree view) image, originally developed to make landscape views and valued for recording formal gatherings of large groups of people, was not being used by artists. Bailey's use of this format heralded the current craze for such a format which finds its expression in both inexpensive throw-away panoramic cameras and the "stitched" 360 degree panoramas being produced via computer techniques. Bailey also worked with photo emulsion to create constructions that thrust his images back into the real world.

TODD WALKER The University of Florida.1970-1977

After Douglas Prince left the University of Florida, Todd Walker was asked to join the faculty. Walker, who was a legendary professional photographer in Los Angeles, had been moving toward his own personal vision quest after a successful career shooting photographs for Chevrolet ads and other commercial ventures.He had begun experimenting with a variety of alternative photographic processes (gum printing, blue printing, colotype, offset printing, silk screen); and he started a systematic investigation of image manipulation through the solarization of images to distort and render alternative realities. (He was the Giotto of Photoshop.) Walker had the ability to read any text about photographic processes and then be able to duplicate the process or reinvent it. When asked how he did that, he would simply say with a sly grin, "Well...it's just like everything else..." In the 60's and 70's Walker took the nude female form as his text and always read into those forms a vibrant expression of color and energy. In the 1980's and 1990's, he photographed rocks and plant forms; and using elementary early computer machine code, he taught himself how to turn any pixel on his screen into any color he wanted it to be. He used code taken from encryption programs and from 3 D land mapping programs and ran his images through those codes to see what they would look like. Once I heard him say, " I can do in 15 minutes with the computer what used to take me three weeks to do with film." He had no use for any user friendly interfaces such as those developed by Apple and Microsoft. He could launch one of his hand coded pieces of software and take an image apart long before Photoshop could even look at that same image. It's no wonder Adobe never offered him any support. He laughed at the slowness of their efforts.

ROBERT FICHTER Florida State University,1972-present

The following comments are offered by the artist about his work:

As I look back on my professional life, I clearly see a trace line from Moholy-Nagy through Henry Holmes Smith, through Jerry Uelsmann to myself.(The rhetoric of experimentalism was our chosen tongue.) When I studied with Uelsmann at the University of Florida in the early 1960's, the colors of photography were black and white, and continuous tone 8x10 inch prints were the standard of the day. At that time a degree in art from the University of Florida had to be in painting, sculpture, printmaking or design,not photography. On the national scene in those days, photography was not collected by most major museums and certainly no major artist worked in photography, at least as far as art critics and the mass media were concerned. Today of course photography is considered to be one of the 'hottest" media in which an artist can work. Studying with Uelsmann helped me to feel the freedom to photograph anything that seemed relevant to the way I felt, a freedom I've never lost. Uelsmann recognized my radical attitude toward photography and he still says,"Fichter steps on his negatives before he prints them." After I completed a BFA degree in painting and printmaking, Uelsmann sent me to study with his former mentor, Henry Holmes Smith,at Indiana University, where I became involved in using various historical and alternative processes. I completed my MFA degree there and then accepted a position as junior curator at the Eastman House Museum of Photography under the direction of Nathan Lyons.That institution was then launching a series of exhibitions that were to define photography in a much broader form than it had previously been viewed in America. The experience exposed me to a huge archive of images; it was like being let loose as one of the "Raiders of the Lost Ark." In 1968, I was invited to join the Art Faculty at UCLA where I taught for four years with Robert Heinecken, one of the earliest proponents of the use of appropriated imagery and certainly the leading West Coast non-traditionalist photo artist. I was invited to join the faculty of the Department of Art at Florida State University in 1972; I accepted that offer because I was impressed by the concepts and attitudes of the art faculty, who were establishing a program in which all disciplines of studio art were treated equally in an interdisciplinary manner. This seemed consonant with my view of art as imagemaking that transcends the limitations of any one medium.

I continue to view myself as an experimentalist,a narrative artist whose interest is in the expression of some of the questions raised by human existence.

DAVID YAGER The University of South Florida,1972-1985

When I was asked was asked to start a graduate program in photography at FSU, I recruited David Yager and Fred Ensley to come as graduate students and serve as his first teaching assistants. Both Ensley (who had studied with me at UCLA) and Yager were close colleagues and they responded to my admonishment to push photography's boundaries. Upon completion of his MFA, Yager was hired to teach at the University of South Florida, where he later became department chairman and then director of Graphic Studios. He left USF to become chairman of the Department of Art at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where he founded one of the leading graduate level computer graphics programs in the country, The Imaging Research Center. David Yager's early photographic vision was greatly influenced by the Swiss photographer Robert Frank. He had been exposed to Frank's images while studying with Mike McLaughlin at the University of Connecticut and he liked the honesty of Frank's vision. Robert Frank's book, The Americans, influenced Yager's generation and established the field of street photography in America, setting up the arena for such photographers as Winogrand and Friedlander. Yager moved into photography from an early interest in creative writing;he realized that since words gave him visual images he could work with visual images directly. While at the University of Connecticut Yager was mentored by the poet James Scully,who in addition to supporting Yager's vision, gave him a book he had edited, Poets on Poetry; Yager read it in tandem with Nathan Lyons' collection of essays by photographers, Photographers on Photography. Yager points out that both books dealt with image making but that the poets were better able to articulate their ideas. While his early influences were all single frame image makers, Yager very quickly began to explore layering of images through a variety of techniques, cutting and pasting, then rephotographing, multiple printing, etc. When he started teaching he felt that "a photograph should look like anything you think it should look like." Today he points out that "there's no such thing as photography... it's all just making marks on different surfaces... its all about collecting things and making marks... collecting images, collecting ideas, getting them down on paper in some way."

TYLER TURKLE Florida State University,1975-1987

When Tyler Turkle joined the faculty at Florida State University in 1975, his attitude was that photographic artists should be making not taking photographs . His photographic mentor was Richard Meyers, filmmaker, at Kent State University in Ohio. In his film work Tyler has followed thecinema verite documentary approach. His films include Yo-Yo, Walking the Dog, The Rugby Film, Cut, Wakulla, The Last Days of Eddy Marconi and Gator (a work in progress). In his still image work Turkle laid out an approach on the experimental edge of photography, working from the copy machine aesthetic which really expanded as he developed a technique of pouring plastic on the images he appropriate from mass culture. The year he came to FSU he poured acrylic on a Jerry's Restaurant menu (from a local coffee shop/restaurant) to transform it into a painting. In 1983-84, he created the Plastic Publicity series; in this series he poured plastic on publicity stills from commercial films. In these 8"x10" images the poured plastic is used to radically transform the publicity stills into silhouettes. They point in a direct way back to the nineteenth century tradition of silhouette portraiture. These create a radical subversion of the virtues of the continuous tone, lens formed image, taking everything out but the outline of the figures photographed and the positive/negative shapes of the picture plane. This reduction to a more primitive visual form thus leads us to see just how much of our perception is based on the outlines of objects.The ordinary and the mundane are removed;the essence remains. In more recent large scale images, Turkle uses a similar strategy with large scale color prints, but he plays large mono-color shapes against lens formed information to create a tension between mundane color print and modernist art object.

VIRGIL MIRANO Florida State University,1976-1977

Virgil Mirano loved the work of traditional West Coast photographers-- Edward Weston, Minor White, Wynn Bullock--but he resisted emulating them when he began to make his own work. He questioned why he should redo that work. In a sense Mirano's work in this exhibition can be directly related to the work of the French artist Yves Klein, not only in form but in attitude;it reflects his desire to use the most direct means possible to express his feelings. His use of the found, the discarded and the human form as signs falls within the field of endeavor explored by Klein. Unlike Klein, Mirano did not have an art agenda;his pieces are in part a result of his habit of "rag picking," looking through the castoffs of an age of excessive image production. As he looked though the trash heap of a printing company, he began to love the proof prints and printing mistakes he found there. He came across rolls of discarded diazo paper, a product that architects and engineers used to reproduce their drawings. This paper required ultraviolet light and thus could not be projected upon by any readily available means. It could however be used to make photograms. It was simply processed after exposure by ammonia fuming and it yielded a direct positive image. The long, wide strips of paper allowed Mirano to break free of the bounds of traditional form and scale. A figurative image maker to the core, he chose to contact print human beings and their clothing. He created the first of these large scale images while studying with Darrell Curran at California State University, Fullerton. The first time he showed his work, its scale and immediate impact immediately drew the other students, who came and stared in amazement. Mirano had used what was to him an ordinary everyday attitude of making something out of what was in front of him to create something new. The images were, as he points out, a product of the time, the late 1960's and early 1970's, in which everything was in play. For him there were no rules for art making. Mirano finished his degree at California State Fullerton and then completed his MFA at UCLA with Robert Heinecken, who had been Curran's mentor. He came to Florida State University for a year to fill in for me while I was away on leave. Mirano taught briefly at the Chicago Art Institute and then returned to Los Angeles where he became deeply involved with motion picture production especially the area of special effects. Recently he has become a highly valued cinematographer for filmmaker Victor Nunez and has won praise from film critic Gene Shalit, who has said that Mirano should have won an Academy Award for his work on Nunez' film, ULEE'S GOLD.

GEORGE BLAKELY Florida State University,1978-present

George Blakely studied with Darrell Curran, at California State University, Fullerton, for his undergraduate degree and with William Larson, at Philadelphia's Tyler School of Art, for his masters degree.He is totally postmodernist in attitude toward the photographic image; even in his early student days he collected and assembled photographs. Blakely does not make photos, he utilizes hem. Beginning in his undergraduate days while working at Disneyland, Blakely would collect the discarded Polaroids, the day's failed snapshots, and he would assemble them into various configurations. He then moved on to the myriad of photographs that are generated by the returned, rejected prints at photo finishing facilities. Of the resulting works, "Cubic Foot", 1978, is the most radical. It is simply a cubic foot of reject prints bound and presented as a floor piece. It defeated all the preconceptions of photographic art form of the period. He continued more conventionally utilizing a grid, using various motifs: blue skies, dogs, etc. ("Delineation", 20" x 25") and then moved on to making decorative, sculptural pieces with sets of postcards ("Florida Postcards", 48" x 36", 1981). He began to excise the photographic imagery from encyclopedias and photo history books to create a sort of subversive visual text ("Newhall's History", 6'x 8' 1987). His reaction to the flood of photographic imagery led him to create"Yard Art", 1988. Setting pieces of metal rebar into the earth outside his house he pushed issue after issue of popular magazines down toward the ground, creating stacks of magazines left to the elements, the ultimate anti-archival gesture. The City of Tallahassee was so upset by the sight of these pieces that they tried to force him to remove them from his yard. Blakley protested on the grounds of artistic license and good ecological recycling intentions and won. Today his yard is completely overgrown, with these sculptures competing with bamboo and native plants in riotous abundance. in recent years he has embedded his found images in plastic or cement rather than make flat work ("Tablets,1993-96). He is, however, currently attracted to transforming these cast pieces via computer scans into wall art ("We Clowns",1999).

WALLACE WILSON The University of Florida,1979-1994 The University of South Florida,1994-present

When Wallace Wilson came to teach at the University of Florida, the demand for photography had continued at a striking rate; and Gene Grissom, who was then chairing the department, realized that the photography program,with its stellar legacy of Uelsmann, Prince, Walker and Streetman, was a strong contender for national and international visibility. Wilson notes that when he began teaching at the University of Kentucky in 1970, he would probably have said that a photograph was usually made with a camera and the print would be black and white, ranging in size from 4" x 6" to 11" x 14", mounted on a white mat;by the time he was hired to join Uelsmann and Streetman he was highly involved in using collage. He soon added dimensionality in order to address the issue of the flatness of the photograph with a relief technique, augmented by hand coloring. By the mid-1980's, Wilson began to explore the issue of scale, an issue which has dogged photography over the years. He began to make large, black and white images (4' x 6') of ordinary subjects from a visually disorienting perspective. He says, "I find gratification in the lack of specific (stable) answers to these images." For a work commissioned by the Southeast Museum of Photography in the late 1980's, Wilson created a gigantic image of a baby; it is on translucent material and appears to be "illuminated much like in a movie theater." He says of this work, "I wanted to see if the startling content and scale dominance of the singular image would carry a power to overwhelm the viewer...the picture of the baby statue truly became iconographic." After teaching at The University of Florida for a decade and a half, Wallace Wilson accepted a position as chair of the Department of Art at the University of South Florida. Today Wilson holds the opinion that a photograph is simply a static lens formed image of some sort. He has begun to investigate digital imagery and its meaning for mass culture. He continues to explore large scale imagery;more recently these projects have greatly expanded in scale and involve other people interacting with him to create the work. He writes that "one project involved text and pictures in a digitally printed 24" x 288" scroll that depicted the the life of a senior citizen who lives in an assisted care facility. My 10 year-old daughter and her friends were the subjects - complete with period costumes and settings. My wife, Mary Straw, a teacher/artist/designer, was my partner in the creation of the work."

1 Art and Photography, Aaron Scharf. pg. 19, 1968. 2 High modernist theory presented the field of photography as a territory defined by the single frame and unmanipulated photographic image. An image was important because it was true. The picture was seen as truth, a single moment in time, frozen and plucked out of the flux of change. It was an activity separate from all other art forms, sometimes yielding a poetic image, but usually representing exact reality.When a poetic image was produced by this esthetic system, it was framed in terms of a personal, subjective revelatory act. In the mid-1960's, a time of less corporate ownership of our cultural lives, this seemed a somewhat hospitable position. By the 1990's, modernism had been dethroned and was being routinely attacked by critics such as Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Hilton Kramer, and Allan Sekula, who were confronted with the large mass of photographs being produced by university trained artists.

Photography at the Dock. Abigail Solomon-Godeau 1991. pg. 82 "Art photography...privileged subjectivity and the use of formal properties to express that subjectivity. pg. 87 Implicit in the notion of the photographer's expressive mediation of the world through the use of his or her instrument is a related constellation of assumptions: the subjectivity of vision and the camera as medium of that subjectivity; the sovereignty of authorship;the belief that the meaning of a photograph exists autonomously within the boundaries of its frame. That those assumptions are coeval with modernism -what Walter Benjamin called the theology of art and are, in fact, its photographic analog..."

3 April 25 2000 written response to RWF's questions. 4 Ibid.