Christa Kreeger Bowden

Still Flight

Sept. 3 - Nov. 4, 2010

A few years ago, winged creatures, recently expired, began to find me. Or perhaps, I started to notice them in my path... a moth attracted to a porch lamp and fallen in the sunlight of the morning, a hummingbird prostrate on cement steps after hitting an exterior window, a bat who flew accidentally into a friendʼs car on a long night drive home. These creatures are to me, first and foremost, visually interesting. They embody the idea of the still life, the nature morte, in that they are beautiful and worthy of artistic evaluation. It is the gift of photography that their beauty can be immortalized, and essentially transformed by the artistʼs gaze. These are not biological studies of specimens, and these photographs are very definitely made, not taken.

Process and subject are intimately intertwined in this body of work. The subjects are explored through a combination of 19th and 21st century photographic processes. The ambrotypes are created by coating black glass with collodion and silver nitrate, and then exposing the wet plate with 19th century lenses, giving the subject a softness of focus and an ambiguity. In contrast, the same subject is photographed directly with a flatbed scanner. This method renders the subject with clarity and excruciating detail: a mothʼs body is furry, its wings scaly, its antennae, like the fronds of a new fern. Comparing these processes, and their ability to transform the same subject, reveals to me the power that I have as an artist over my subject, and ultimately how I choose to reveal my subject to the viewer. I believe that in the end, photography is as much subjective editing as it is a truth document.

Ultimately, these are small visual memorials to the fallen. After they have given me their visual gifts, I often place them in the woods where they can return to the earth from whence they came. The irony in this work is that it is simultaneously about life and death, about flight and stillness, about photographic truth and the constructed image, about the alchemy of process and its ability to manipulate the subject. But above all, this work is about the ability of a photograph to hold a subject and a moment in time perfectly still, long after that subject has left the earth and time marches forward beyond that moment. In the end, memory is most valuable gift that photography gives us.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Christa Kreeger Bowden was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. She earned her MFA in photography from the University of Georgia and a BA in photography and film communication from Tulane University. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at Washington & Lee University, where she started the program in photography in 2006. Her work explores the use of a flatbed scanner as a camera, as well as alternative and 19th century photographic processes. She is the recipient of a 2009-2010 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, and was a 2005 nominee for the Santa Fe Prize for Photography. She lives in Lexington, Virginia with her husband Nathan and their son Zachary. https://www.christabowden.com/