Finding similarities between photography and alchemy is nothing new, but the way Susan Bryant transforms simple objects into dynamic visual autobiographies begs the comparison nonetheless. With a centuries-old process that requires both precision and experimentation, Bryant turns a mannequin’s hand into a haunting study on the nature of presence. A chair becomes a stand-in for an absent family member. A shaded pathway becomes a visual representation of how it feels to fear the future. And so on.
Bryant began to notice the symbolic nature of objects in childhood, and she developed a lifelong fascination with human hands and the gestures they make. She was taught to appreciate the particular gracefulness of hands in ballet class as a 5-year-old, and she’s looking forward to learning American Sign Language in her retirement from her 37-year career at Austin Peay State University. It’s been a long journey, and hands have been a throughline.
“I like how present they are,” she says of her continuing interest in hands, recalling how children are taught to raise their hands when a teacher calls for attendance as a simple but unmistakable visual declaration of presence: “I am here.”
“Second to the eyes, a person’s hands communicate the most information about them,” Bryant says.
The cultural universality of these signals is another facet of Bryant’s fascination. In the Buddhist and Hindi traditions of hatha yoga, of which Bryant is a practitioner, hands are placed in gestural formations called mudras to stimulate different parts of the body or affect the flow of energy. In Christian imagery, Jesus and the saints are often portrayed with their hands in similar positions.
“I’m interested in how hands have mirrored human emotion and intention throughout the history of art,” she says in her artist’s statement, “and how such gestures lend themselves to metaphor and are imbued with a powerful presence.”
The works in humanature include shots of false hands — like those used in factories that manufacture rubber gloves — as well as closely cropped photographs of the hands of Renaissance-era marble statues. It’s a mix of high and low that works well for the photographer, who exudes a poised but youthful joy in the work she creates.
Bryant’s focus on the specificity of gestures was especially helpful when she began using a wet-plate collodion process in the early Aughts. The chemistry involved in developing pictures in that way demands precision and timeliness — working with a dirty plate creates distinct imperfections, and the process requires that Bryant use a fishing tent as a portable on-site darkroom.
From 1851 until about 1880, the collodion process was the dominant mode of photography. But in the 21st century, it’s a specialty that’s confined to a small crew of devoted followers — including Sally Mann, who shares Bryant’s interest in Southern landscapes. In addition to her wet-plate work, Bryant utilizes a combination of digital and early photographic processes, often producing plates from digital shots. “My process yields tintypes, ambrotypes and gelatin silver prints made from the glass negatives, in addition to limited-edition digital prints made from scans of the metal and glass plates,” Bryant explains in her artist’s statement. “I’m challenged and inspired by this leaping from one century’s technology and aesthetic to another.” That leap is its own kind of alchemy.
“Shooting digitally, there’s a transformation — a lack of sharpness,” Bryant says. “With collodion, the process is slow, and images can be really detailed. When you shoot digitally, there’s a transformation from jpeg to plate to print. Things happen that I don’t expect.”
The imperfections in collodion photography each have their own mysterious sounding names — “oysters” and “comets” are common stains left when plates haven’t been cleaned properly, and would be instantly recognizable to someone familiar with the practice. But since photography in the 21st century can seem so antiseptic, those telltale imperfections take on a postmodern novelty. They become layers of an image, adding visual information to an already detailed story.
Bryant directs her human subjects away from the camera lens, and in that way each portrait remains slightly anonymous. “That way,” Bryant explains, “it’s not a portrait of a particular person.” A girl with a long braid down her back — Bryant’s granddaughter, she tells me — approaches iconic when examined from behind. But where details like faces don’t have much place in humanature, the abundance of otherwise unnoticeable details emerge. The stray hair, the wrinkled shirt edge, the confidence of her subject’s posture.
Other objects Bryant returns to are empty chairs and suitcases. “I’m interested in objects that are made for humans, but there’s no humans there. The vacancy is what’s powerful,” she says.
Bryant shot a still life of a nest while was waiting for her son’s adoption papers to process, little flecks of oyster stains on its edge. She shot her own hands cradling a wax sculpture of a heart during a time of unsure heart health. Because it’s always Bryant herself behind the camera, her presence is always subtext. In that sense, all of these photos are portraits of the artist herself.
When Bryant began shooting landscapes five years ago, she spent one summer taking road trips in the country, hiking trails among the ticks and sticky Southern heat. She realized that she could travel by car, and quickly set up on the roadside in one of the South’s winding forest roads, enjoying the air-conditioning while she traveled between sites.
“I am interested in both the vistas and the vastness as well as the warm, enveloping canopies of the landscape in the south,” she says in her artist’s statement. “I am equally awe-struck by the comfort and the threat nature bestows.”
When you see several shots of paths and roads in humanature — one angled downward and showing a shadowy tunnel through trees, another pointing up toward a well-lit path — it’s not simply because of the intrinsic metaphorical power of a passageway. It’s also because Bryant is resourceful, and knows that she can figure out how to take beautiful photographs without sacrificing modern comforts.
The humanature exhibit includes rows of shelves, where viewers can see ambrotypes and tintypes, outside of their frames. Seen in this setting, a photograph becomes much more of an object itself, and not only its representation.
“Photography transformed subject into object,” Roland Barthes writes in his seminal volume Camera Lucida. “The Photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been.”
That’s the heart of Bryant’s work — hers isn’t a photography that’s based on nostalgia, even as it captures the ghostly imprints of unused objects with antiquated technology. A Susan Bryant photograph collapses the barriers between objects.
During a recent trip to Europe, Bryant dropped her camera. It cracked, and the normally soft-spoken photographer was crestfallen. The photographs in humanature of a soaring Florence skyline at sunset were taken with a replacement camera, bought on the cheap from a local whose English was only slightly better than Bryant’s Italian. If it seems surprising that the resulting photos are some of the best in the exhibit, that’s likely because you never had Bryant as your teacher.
“I tell my students all the time — it’s not the camera,” she says, as if reminding herself through retelling the story. “It’s the light.”
Laura Hutson Hunter is a freelance writer, editor, curator and art advisor, and host of Artists Talk, a weekly art talk show on WXNA.
You can find her writing in the Nashville Scene, where she worked as the arts editor for the better half of a decade. She also writes for VICE and Art in America. Her style is categorized as non-academic intellectual writing — She loves bringing big ideas down to earth. As an independent curator and art advisor, She's interested in exhibiting contemporary art from emerging and under-the-radar artists. She's curated a three-person art show about sex magick called Triple Fantasy at Third Man Records, and co-curated Selvage, an exhibit about textile-based art, with her friend Jodi Hays at Tennessee State University. Hunter graduated from New York University with the individualized major of Art History and Cultural Anthropology. She's lived in East Tennessee and East Africa. She has a deep familiarity with Nashville-based artists combined with an expertise in contemporary art — and no shortage of opinions. |