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at Rosamund Felsen Gallery by Mario Cutajar of Art Scene
Looking at Grant Mudford's large format photographs of the Walt Disney Concert Hall under construction, you can't help coming away thinking how interesting contemporary buildings are in their unfinished state, more so than before their innards are sealed up and they become the slick, reticent facades of money and power. Mudford has been photographically documenting construction sites, often on commission, for close to two decades. Among his notable series are those devoted to Parliament House, Canberra, Australia; a hospital emergency room; and Our Lady of the Angels cathedral. His most recent series focuses on the Frank Gehry–designed Walt Disney Concert Hall going up just down the street from Our Lady. Ten of the prints are on display here.
Frank Gehry's virtuosic essay in cubofuturist form– architecture as sculpture– is a particularly fitting subject for a photographer who uses photography as an abstract medium. Construction sites in general offer the photographer an almost infinite variety of volumes and textures to play with. Tackling the Disney Hall site adds the extra dimension of dealing with a building whose self-consciously flamboyant form keys up the artificiality of the façade, and gives the photographer the opportunity to draw a closer parallel between the building activity documented and the photograph itself as a construction: the photograph as façade. Mudford has long held that photographs are "excellent liars." So for him the explicitness of the frame is paramount. Looking at a Mudford photograph, you are always aware that what's on display has been deliberately isolated and composed. In the Disney Hall photographs, as in his photographs in general, the site is invariably depopulated, making the scale ambiguous. In those photographs that collage parts of the rising hall against a backdrop of the downtown skyline, the edges of the picture are expressly determined by the requirements of the composition, not those of "information." With no scale markers, no tilting of the camera in any direction, and no foreground, Mudford's images are as flat as abstract paintings. The effect is accentuated by the unfinished state of the structures, which sometimes are chopped off just where they approach the picture plane, almost as if the picture plane was some kind of guillotine that truncated anything that might project out of it (Disney #2). In photographs of the interior scaffolding, forests of slender, red pipe supports create delicate web patterns that entangle the eye and keep it from straying beyond the surface. These are the most overtly "painterly" photographs in the series. The images from the Disney Hall series don't transmit any overt critical or political messages. Mostly they function as rigorous abstract images even as they tweak the notion of photographic documentation. And yet, one can't help but think that an extended fascination with the glamorized finished product, implies a certain sympathy for the humble. This seems particularly evident in a photograph of a section of the façade of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. The focus is on some plastic sheets draped over a terrace and the stain-like shadows they cast on the concrete. The sheets become stand-ins for the paintings that will hang in the Arts Center when it's finished, but their placement is entirely accidental and evanescent. The art is in the noticing.
"My Favorite Photographs," Patricia Faure Gallery,
1983 Interview of Grant Mudford by Jacqueline Perren of The Trade
Grant Mudford was president of his high school camera club in Australia before studying architecture at University of New South Wales, Sydney. Mudford then took what he’s learned from architecture and returned to photography. Upon establishing his own studio, his work included everything from advertising, pop and fashion magazines, to cinematography and theater.
We’re luck he’s back. Mudford’s photographs of ordinary things made extraordinary are indispensable monuments to the future: This is what we looked at every day; this is what we were, or are. In his photographs, we see our landscapes transformed and elevated. They are the same as before, but now they reveal themselves. Mudford’s photographs have appeared in numerous publications and in dozens of gallery exhibitions, including New York’s Light Gallery and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution. Collections in which his work appears include New York’s Museum of Modern Art, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, and Washington, D.C.’s Library of Congress. A continuing exhibit of his current work opened in February at Rosamund Felsen Gallery on La Cienega. Where do you draw the line between commercial and fine art photography? MUDFORD: The real distinction to me is the intent; why the photograph was taken. When you’re doing commercial photography, ultimately – no matter how “creative” – it’s the clients who call the shots. It either works for the clients or it doesn’t. They have a problem they’re paying you to solve. That’s not to say that art can’t be used for advertising. I mean, Andy Warhol’s work illustrates that; I’m sure Campbell’s Soup didn’t complain. I got to a stage with commercial work when it really frustrated me; I started losing my passion for the medium. I knew I loved making my own photographs but hadn’t fully resolved what I wanted to do. I kept coming back to the problem of finding the time and money to pursue my own photography while simultaneously runny a commercial studio. What makes photography art? MUDFORD: The manner in which it is used and viewed. Most photography serves a purpose outside its own unique function that often has little to do with the subject of the photograph. Photographs to me are excellent liars. They really are deceitful. Photographs often purport to do a specific job. But as conveyers of actual news, they’re terrible. It was the most convenient thing to use for awhile, but I see it as an abstract medium. Do you feel that the attitude towards photography as an art for is changing? MUDFORD: Yeah. It’s getting better. There are a lot of people who, ten years ago, wouldn’t consider having photography in a collection. The market is broadening. The biggest hurdle photography has as art is that people grow up seeing photography as something other than art. And let’s be honest. Most photography is not art. Who are your influences? MUDFORD: I have many, actually. I have a lot of architectural heroes. In photography, Brandt, definitely. Walker Evans. Certain aspects of people’s work I respond to. Certain things Harry Callahan has done, for instance, are, I think, important. I think Walker Evans will go down as the master of this century. He’s responsible for twisting everybody’s head around and redefining what the camera can do. He was a big influence on me and on many people I respond to, like Robert Frank. Considering the short period of time Frank worked, he was brilliant. Many photographers, unfortunately, have very short creative periods. Have you done portraiture? MUDFORD: I have done some. Actually, I’ve been anticipating a series of portraits. It’s totally resolved in my mind. All I have to do is get through the mechanics. I make it sound simple, but it won’t be really. I’ve done enough photographs of people to have a clear idea of what I want to do. It doesn’t really matter who I’m photographing. It could be anybody. But I do need some very powerful studio lighting before continuing further with this type of project. What kind of equipment do you use? MUDFORD: I use everything. I like equipment. My recent black-and-white exterior photographs were done with modest equipment, though I think they have a feeling of grandeur about them. Most of that work was done with a handheld thirty-five millimeter camera. I usually work very simply but like having all the tools there to draw from. I usually end up using one lens and one camera, and do an entire body of work. There are so many variables. I like to reduce them to a minimum. There are many ways to make photographs without using a wide range of lenses. I appreciate the discipline of learning to see with a specific lens. The more you understand and become familiar with one lens, the more intense the vision and the perception that is revealed. Does that also apply to subject matter? MUDFORD: And like the one-lens philosophy: scrutinizing something as a photograph. For example, some buildings are not that interesting as buildings; they’re anonymous. So what do these photographs reveal about any of them? What interests me is that they’re more interesting as photographs than as buildings. Magic is a terrible word to use, but there is a sort of magic in this transformation. I used to have this need for exotic subjects. I’d go anywhere….travel anywhere. I’ve come to realize it’s the photograph that is ultimately interesting. I’m dealing with an abstract medium that has little to do with documentation. People talk about having a sophisticated eye, an intelligent eye, but we’re all capable of making assessments visually. People want to take photographs of things they respond to as being visually significant. They recognize something they want to preserve but don’t always see it in terms of a photograph. Invariably, the things I see and get excited about are not the things I want to photograph. When I set out to take photographs, my mind switches into a mode of photographic seeing; I start seeing in photographic terms. I know what the camera can do and I look for photographs. I don’t do that twenty-four hours a day. I’d go crazy – it’s so intense. Basically, I do a lot of walking, looking for things I don’t normally look at. Sometimes I make it a point to stop at every corner and spend ten or fifteen minutes scrutinizing everything. Corners have so many good aspects. Has the evolution of technology has a significant affect on the art of photography? MUDFORD: Not really. Not overall. I’m still sloshing paper around in trays of chemicals in the dark. There are enough possibilities to explore when just exposing the film. How much of your art takes place after the photograph has been taken? MUDFORD: It’s hard to separate how much of the process takes place before and after. Ansel Adams calls it “pre-visualization” – seeing a print before exposing the negative. There aren’t many people who can make statements with photographs. And he’s made a substantial one. The people who do end up making them have a total commitment to what they’re doing, relating it to everything in their lives. You do have other things in your life; I mean, Adams has an interest in music that relates back to his work as a photographer. So much of me goes into the work. I think the medium of photography has immense potential. I see all things that man makes as being important. You don’t have to take photographs of people to describe people. The products we make are very telling. I’m interested in the arbitrary stuff…the ordinary stuff. The factory nobody pays much attention to is still put together for a specific purpose, with its integrity and value. The majority that goes out without too much fuss says more about our culture and the art of mankind. I get enjoyment out of monumentalizing apparently trivial stuff. It’s what we’re about.
Grant Mudford’s black-and-white photographs oppose both our inattention to our environment and the reasons for it. We tend to perceive our environment – the “landscape of man,” as an English architect put it – in a fractional way. Partly this is die to the innocuous aspect of the urban vista, disallowing for prolonged contemplation. Most buildings are expedient containers whose exteriors are deadly dull. But Mudford hones in on this relentless banality to seek out inadvertant points of interest, usually in the language of isolated sign.
One photograph taken in Los Angeles shows a metal sign with the word “parking” in sculpted relief on a wall of marble cladding. The preciousness of the materials runs counter to the poverty of the information offered. Another building in Los Angeles has a white, windowless facade, utterly blank save for a banner hanging from one end, which has the word “golf” on it. This signage, decontextualized as it is, is poetically enigmatic. Plain brick walls bear off neologisms like “Nix Suppl” and “Fabmagic.” While Mudford presents these sites unhabited, nature does crop up, though under human subjugation. Trees are encircled by asphalt; grass is kept at crew-cut length. A picture taken in Las Vegas shows a massive signboard that totally overwhelms a shingled hut with two pathetic, lollipop-shaped bushes next to it. The flouted conventions of Vegas architecture, even in Mudford’s heavily-cropped views, are wholly recognizable. The base of sign column with fantastically magnified faux woodgrain, are undeniably “Vegas.” The same cannot be said for most of the other photographs in this exhibition. Despite being taken in places as diverse as Australia and Mexico, each picture is really a non-locale of repetitive brickwork and corrugated metal. Whether this is indicative of a debased International Style, or just the global standardization of building materials, is debatable. Mudford’s photographic prowess aestheticizes his subject matter, as these obviously well-composed pictures attest (his use of peripheral deep space to offset wall patterns in the foreground is particularly effective). If there is such a thing as industrial beauty, Mudford has captured it as well as anyone can.
Since he moved to Los Angeles from Australia in the late 1970s, Grant Mudford has composed photographs that crisply examine the streamlined geometries of West Coast architecture and landscape. Mudford has zeroed in on the abstract formal relationship lurking within the designs of gas stations, strip malls and apartment buildings. The geometrical arrangements highlighted in his photographs of the masterful modernist structures of Rudolf Schindler and Craig Ellwood have disclosed a link between their mid-century architecture and contemporaneous hard-edge abstractions of L.A. painters John McLaughlin and Lorser Feitelson.
In his shimmering new large-scale color photographs of Frank Gehry’s soon-to-be-completed Disney Concert Hall in downtown L.A., Mudford distills the building’s baroque essence, presenting its burgeoning, in progress architecture – torqued grids, angled l-beams, curvaceous cladding – as a dense, intricate hive. Devoid of humans, the photographs display the building’s guts as a complex organic system that portends its imminent service as a busy gathering place. The intricate, multiangled vectors of duckwork, scaffolding, lattices, building cranes and raw beams conjure a kind of teeming energy field with light as its core. Two shots from within the future auditorium seem to tunnel through scores of crisscrossing scaffolds towards the stage as light filters down through swooping ceiling tarps. In another photograph, scaffolding that flanks a staircase sets off gridded skyscrapers surrounding the construction site. Five bright yellow cylindrical garbage canisters in the foreground contrast with the skyline’s rectangular solids to create a composition that suggests an abstract still life. Another pair of images features the linear play of beams that support one of the building’s soaring planes. Suggesting shipbuilding, the site’s arklike cavities become fantastic constructivist studies in torsion. Unlike Andreas Gursky, Mudford is never disengaged or at arm’s length from his architectural subject. With light, color and sharp focus, he draws viewers into this elaborate structure to imply the potential social energy humming within Gehry’s stainless-steel facade.
Today, it's almost impossible to recall how color photography was once regarded with suspicion — not merely by the art public, but among photographers as well. As recently as the 1970s William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore and other pioneers had to contend with color's established associations with commercial rather than creative concerns. Black and white signaled art photography, sober and committed to darkroom rigor; color signaled advertising and the rotogravure, not to mention the alien realm of painting.
Grant Mudford played with this peculiar cultural conditioning in a marvelous 1982 series of photographs that has now been reformatted for an impressive show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery. Printed at the scale of paintings — about 4 feet high and 5 feet wide — their subjects are the tubs in which industrial paints are commercially mixed. Shown empty, the tubs are smeared and splattered in rainbow hues. They suggest vernacular action paintings, or "found abstractions." One peculiar feature of the imagery is that it's difficult to gauge the buckets' actual size. Each of eight photographs isolates a single tub against an asphalt background, like an iconic saint. Without a combination of memory and close scrutiny of the minutiae of pavement debris, the tubs' physical dimensions are elusive. The tubs are empty, flexible containers for unnameable colors — which is a resonant metaphor for Mudford's own photographs. (Two other pictures instead show wooden pallets encrusted with paint, but the coy pun on "palette" is distracting.) The group is titled "Shiva Paint Tubs," after the Hindu god of transformation for whom creation emerges from destruction. The tensions between painting and photography are wittily evoked. Lord Shiva's dance teaches that the energy of art is finally what sustains us. Mudford's colorful works take the age-old waltz between painting and photography for a provocative turn around the floor. Dating to the moment 20 years ago when painting was poised for a major return to prominence and photography was finding parity with its ancient cousin, they're incisive images.
Grant Mudford has never taken the photograph for granted, declaring in one interview that “photographs to me are excellent liars” and that he is “dealing with an abstract medium that has little to do with documentation.” An artist who first became known in the United States for a series of 35mm black and white works that captured the visual experience of modern America through images of its vernacular – streets and sidewalks, walls and road signs – Mudford’s distrust of the photograph itself has led to commissions to photograph a wide array of sites, from coal mines in Australia to the docks of Long Beach. His images attend to the specificity of pictorial framing and a complex visual vocabulary based on diagonals and parallel planes: in a pivotal series of the half-constructed Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, the scaffolding enveloping the building and the play of light across it works like a modernist’s grid, reminding us of the integrity of the picture plane and the photograph’s own surface.
Over the past year, the imagination of Angelenos has been gripped by two new buildings being built in the city. Raphael Moneo’s Our Lady of the Angels cathedral has recently opened its doors to the public. Frank O. Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall is going up down the street. Grant Mudford’s photographs of the new cathedral under construction were recently seen in the MOCA’s What’s Shakin’: New Architecture in LA exhibition. Mudford’s sixth exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery will feature large format interior and exterior images of the soaring bare steel armature and twisting stainless steel forms of the Disney Concert Hall under construction, as well as photographs of Zaha Hadid’s Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and the new Simmons Hall at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, designed by architect Steven Holl.
at Rosamund Felsen Gallery by Susan Freudenheim of The Los Angeles Times
“The best buildings are always disappointing to me in photographs,” says Grant Mudford, one of the most sought-after architectural photographers working in this country. “ I see buildings that are accepted as being great works of architecture, and I’ve always experienced them through photographs before I’ve actually experienced them firsthand. I’m always presently surprised when I see the real thing.”
“But,” he adds, “there’s a whole bunch of mediocre works of architecture that look great in photographs, a lot more interesting that they really are.” The best photographs, Mudford believes are full of illusion and abstraction. “I don’t think photography excels at what it is used for mostly, which is to document things.” Despite these contrarian opinions, Mudford spends a great deal of his professional life documenting architecture and his work has been published in nearly every major periodical and architectural journal. He has also provided the images for monographs on Rudolf Schindler and Louis Kahn and photographed the work of many of the greatest architects of our time. “Grant is the best,” says editor Gloria Gerace who commissioned Mudford to shoot Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall for a book being published by the Los Angeles philharmonic in collaboration with the Getty Research Center. A number of other photographers are working on the book, but she wanted someone to create a series of classical images of the building during its construction and at completion. “The person to give you gorgeous photographs,” Gerace says, “is Grant Mudford.” Along the way, Mudford has been doing some work of his own purely as art and as having nothing to do with documentation. These images, now on display at the Santa Monica gallery owned by his longtime dealer and partner, Rosamund Felsen, do not explore the magnificence of Gehry’s statement. Instead, they focus on the messier side of its creation, in 5-foot-tall light-jet prints. Networks of air ducts and webs of scaffolding are central images, as are sweeping exterior planes still surrounded by bare steel armatures and the intersection of soaring cranes with Gehry’s preliminary framework. Although many of these pictures are instantly identifiable as Disney Hall, their interest lies not in the building itself so much as in the patterns that emerge from the rough-and-tumble construction site. “The passage of time is irrelevant, except if you notice that an identical view of the building is depicted, six months apart, in two images. “I am not a ‘decisive moment’ photographer,” says Mudford, referring to the art of capturing the essence of a scene in a single instant so identified with Henri Cartier-Bresson. “My works takes quite a while to compose.” When Mudford is shooting, he makes every effort to respect the architecture. “I felt honored that I’ve been given the responsibility, and I do what I can to make it look good. That’s my job.” The challenge, he says, is not is depicting the forms but in recognizing the totality of the building. “It is not about pizzazz and what you see from the street,” he says, “It’s all about light and space. Those are the two essential qualities of architecture. As Louis Kahn said, ‘Light, the giver of all presences’.” At 58, Mudford still speaks with the soft lilting accent of his native Australia, which he left behind nearly three decades ago. In an interview at the Felsen gallery, he says that although he was always interested in photography, and it came naturally to him even as a young boy, he studied architecture in college at the University of New South Wales in Sidney. He was looking for a profession, in part to reassure his family, but he found he wasn’t very good at drawing. As a result, his avocation became his career and after graduation he began doing commercial photography to make a living and art to satisfy his desires. In 1974, Mudford came to the United States on a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts. The money gave him the means to travel extensively, living out of a van and shooting black-and-white images of innocuous buildings. The large-scale prints focus on details of contrasting flat surfaces, resulting in quasi-abstract compositions reminiscent of the grid paintings of Mondrian, or Ad Reinhardt. Mudford says these early works were influenced by Walker Evans, who magically infused power into small incidents. “One of the beautiful things about photography is that it can turn really dumb stuff that absolutely nobody takes notice of into icons,” he says. Mudford continued on this path until the early ‘80’s and in the process caught the eye of not only the art world but also of the architecture world. Architects began to invite Mudford to document their work and his reputation grew. After dividing his time between New York and Los Angeles for years, he settled here and for the past 20 years has shared his life with Felsen. Throughout, he has continued to make art, including some portraiture and his more idiosyncratic images of light, space and buildings. His work has been exhibited extensively in galleries and museums throughout the U.S. and Australia as well as in Japan. Mudford’s series on Disney Hall shows him moving away from the flat, planar qualities of the early work. The new pictures are still very geometric but with much greater depth and complexity in the subjects. Using the same Swiss Sinar camera that he uses for his commissioned photos and printing the images with Chip Leavitt at A&I in Hollywood (the first time he has not done his own darkroom work), he has achieved a clarity and three-dimensionality reminiscent of the landscapes of Ansel Adams – but on a much larger scale. Mudford says he greatly admires Gehry’s work, and he would seem to have no reason to doubt his own ability to capture it. Nevertheless, he speaks with some trepidation of the competitive challenge he will face when the concert hall is finished. “There’s going to be a million photographers photographing that place inside and out, and I’ll be doing it from the same angle as everybody else.” Looking at the images on the gallery walls, he muses, “This may be the best work I’ll do about this building.”
at Rosamund Felsen Gallery: Press Release, 2004.
For immediate release:
The upcoming exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery will be: Grant Mudford Shiva Paint Tubs and Shane Hope speculative drawcuments and folk crystallographs Los Angeles photographer Grant Mudford has built his career on exposing hidden abstractions and textures locked away in seemingly rigid formal structures. For his upcoming show Grant is revisiting a series of work he started in 1981 and completed in 1982. The Paint Tub series was Grant’s first experiment as an artist with color photography. Still exploring geometry and texture, Grant chose Standard Brand paints mixing buckets as his subjects. Shot straight on, and in color the photos of the paint tubs function as a receptacle for modernist pursuits. The original series of Paint Tubs were Cibachrome prints, and first exhibited in 1983. For this exhibition Grant has re-printed all of the original series, plus some never seen, with the more modern and archival process of chromogenic printing on a considerably larger scale. Los Angeles based artist Shane Hope presents two series of drawings, speculative drawcuments and folk crystallographs. In the speculative drawcument series Hope’s hand drawn, diagrammatic and scientific imagery meet to produce drawings that are proposals for art and technology projects not yet materially feasible. The folk crystallographs are digital C type prints of molecular modeling drawings depicting an array of fishing lures, clowns, chimeric creatures, anatomical abnormalities and assemblages in which Hope establishes a parallel between drawing lines and bonding atoms. The opening reception for Grant Mudford and Shane Hope will be on July 10, 2004 from 5—7pm. For more information, please contact Justin Boyd at 310-828-8488.
at Rosamund Felsen Gallery: Press Release, 2003, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Completed
Since Grant Mudford moved to Los Angeles from Australia in the 1970's he has been engaged in a close examination of the abstract within the formal relationships of modern architecture. This rigorous examination of architecture and subject matter reveals itself through Mudford's innate sense of framing, his close scrutiny of often banal subject matter, and his warm regard for the properties of surface quality.
Grant's show last year focused on three different buildings in various states of flux. Zaha Hadid's Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Simmons Hall at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, designed by architect Steven Holl, and the Frank Gehry designed Walt Disney Concert Hall. For his show this year Grant focuses on a single subject matter, the newly completed Walt Disney Concert Hall. By turning his lens on the finished structure, instead of a building under construction, Grant takes a slight departure from recent bodies of work. He even explores this new ground one step further by allowing the curvatious and baroque structure of the Concert Hall to reveal an emerging sense of romanticism. So please join us in celebrating Grant Mudford's new body of work: Walt Disney Concert Hall, Completed, at the reception to be held on Saturday November 15, 2003 at 5pm.
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at SCI-ARC by Michael Anderson of Art issues 
at Rosmaund Felsen Gallery by Michael Duncan of Art in America 
at Rosamund Felsen Gallery by Christopher Knight of Los Angeles Times 
at Rosamund Felsen Gallery: Press Release, 2002-03