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March 11, 2023 — April 1, 2023
Balance — Jennifer Georgescu
A dual exhibition celebrating Women's History Month featuring work by two women photographers. Susan de Witt creates alternative process photography using techniques like Lith printing and photopolymer gravure. Jennifer Georgescu explores motherhood through conceptual tableaux.
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Born in 1947, Susan grew up in Canada before moving to the United States in the 1970s. Her interest in photography began in 2000, and she took years of photographic training at the Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle. She studied with Mary Ellen Mark, Christopher James, Tim Rudman, and Bruce Barnbaum. As her work evolved, she became seriously interested in the lith process and continued to embrace this darkroom technique for many years.
Her work was influenced by both Sarah Moon's and Lillian Bassman's style. Her shooting and printing style portrays a signature visual appearance in the final outcome of each photograph. The gauzy, dreamlike quality of her images speaks to a forgotten time.
Lith printing, a film-based darkroom process, is a technique of overexposing a black-and-white, infrared, or color negative onto a suitable gelatin silver paper, and then only partially developing it in a very dilute lith developer. This can produce prints with special properties and characteristics in terms of tonal distribution and response to toners. The choice of papers, developers, chemistry temperature, and other variables can all produce hugely varying results. Serendipity often plays a part when lith printing.
Starting in 2016, Susan's interests took a turn toward intaglio printmaking. She produces her prints using photopolymer plates and her etching press. This has renewed her artistic excitement and is a new avenue for her to expand her love of photography. She continues to produce new work to use in her printmaking studio. Both of these processes give forth a tonal warmth that enhances the feminine form and shows off the beauty and strength of these amazing women.
Jennifer Georgescu is an interdisciplinary artist based in Basel, Switzerland. Her self-reflective projects focus on language, relationships, mythologies, and control. She is a three-time finalist for Critical Mass, Photolucida; a recipient of the John Chervinsky Scholarship through the Griffin Museum of Photography; and a grantee of the William Male Foundation Grant in 2019 and 2020.
Mother Series is an ongoing, long-term project that began in 2015 following the birth of my first son. In our beginning days, I had no time to think, no time to sleep, and I didn't dream. I began to feel like a shell of a person whose identity had become lost somewhere along the way. My son nursed relentlessly, and I spent all day and night staring into his tiny face. I began to think of him as more of an extension of myself than his own separate being, and it was difficult to imagine his thoughts as separate from mine. Using my son and myself as photographic subjects, I began documenting the tenderness of love and dependency, while undergoing a loss and transformation of my former self.
With the birth of my second son, and with continued time, I feel the beginnings of their journeys toward independence. What was once an all-encompassing relationship is overshadowed by individual growth and identity. Their transformations are triumphant and bittersweet, and I find myself once again struggling with the loss of a former role.
Drawing inspiration from dramatic, color-saturated Baroque paintings and religious iconography, I have created a symbolic language to decipher the ever-evolving spiritual landscape between mother and child. Through the documentation of psychological weight and tenderness, my photographs show the push and pull of belonging together, while struggling to be apart. The conceptual performances in front of the camera reference subject/photographer, child, and mother, through moments of emotion that can be referenced, cherished, and analyzed.
