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The Reality Principle @ PFA

THE REALITY PRINCIPLE

Karin Davie & Caitlin Teal Price

PFA–Washington, D.C
April 6 - May 25, 2024
Opening reception: Saturday, April 6th, 6 - 8 PM

Caitlin Teal Price, Bue, 2022, x-acto blade etching and colored pencil on hahnemuhle rag paper, 30x40 in

Davie and Price are driven by a shared commitment to form and the importance of process. The works featured in this exhibition present viewers with immersive, psychedelic, abstract terrains that embody the interplay between the micro and the macro, the material and the ephemeral. The careful manipulation of light, color and form could give the viewer the sense that they are looking through a microscope at cellular matter, or through a powerful telescope at intergalactic nebulae. There is a compelling optical contrast between the sense of infinite, deep space evoked by their works, and the tangible physicality of the surfaces they create.

Davie’s seven works featured in the show foreground her mastery of the repeated undulating wave form and gesture. In the larger works, this rhythmic motion skillfully accommodates the borders of her humorously shaped canvases, while in smaller works, it is explored through diptych formats. Price’s nine drawings demonstrate, across a range of sizes, her prowess in intricate, meticulous mark making interwoven with a distinctive use of the play of light. Each artist, grounded in their bodies, undertakes the task of creating with the heightened awareness and hyperfocus similarly required of an athlete. Davie must produce a brush stroke in one steady movement without any room for error lest she must return her surface to the base primer and begin again. Through the mediated layering of gestures, she arranges a series of syncopated waves around a central opening which, when paired with a skillful gradation of color, appears to emanate a shivering light. Price draws in an equally unforgiving procedure that involves incising millimeter-length lines and gouges into a photograph. Her works explore a temporal tension between the capture of a fleeting, almost mischievous instant of natural light and the intensive, tactile labor of etching. Combining these aspects of her process “takes something fluttering and hard to nail down, and puts the concreteness of the physical body back into it.” Stepping back from the intimate, bodily surfaces fashioned by the artists’ concentrated physical mark making, the cosmic scenes remind the viewer of bodies, space, architecture, interiors and exteriors. The key to understanding each artist’s work is physical, substantial, presence.

The Reality Principle refers to the classical psychoanalytic theory of ego regulation; the ability to delay gratification through impulse control and rational thought (a maturing of “The Pleasure Principle,” which compels us to act in pursuit of immediate gratification.) Through controlled, disciplined and choreographed gestures rooted entirely in the concrete and the physical, Davie and Price’s works can make us feel transported to an intangible, metaphysical elsewhere.

An essay by art historian and curator Lily Siegel will accompany this exhibition.

CLICK HERE TO PREVIEW THE EXHIBITION

Karin Davie, Traveling solo No. 2 (diptych) 2023, oil in linen, 54x30in.

into the day, through the night @ Sarasota Art Museum

This work is part of a larger group exhibition tilted The World is Smarter Than You Are, honoring the late and great Richard Benson. Curated by Peter Barberie, Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center, Philadelphia Museum. The exhibition also includes artists: Dawoud Bey, Lois Conner, Jen Davis, An-My Lê, John Lehr, Andrea Modica, Arthur Ou, John Pilson and Sarah Stolfa.

A large, three panel commission in Houston, TX

For the first six month of 2022 I was working on a large scale commission for the lobby of Two Allen Center in Houston, TX. I worked closely with Kimberly Landa and Kinzelman Art consultants to make it happen. below is an interview I did with them about the project.

KAC ARTIST Q&A

Over the course of the past year, Kinzelman Art Consulting has partnered with Brookfield Properties to select an artist to commission a custom work for their newly renovated lobby in Two Allen Center located in Downtown, Houston.

"The lobby of Two Allen Center is a central location for Allen Center, making this an important moment to engage campus employees and visitors. Working with Kinzelman Art Consulting made for a smooth process from art direction to development and final installation. We are pleased to feature this original piece as a new focal point in the lobby, and thank KAC for helping to bring this vision to life. Caitlin Teal perfectly captured the essence of the space."

-Tyler Merritt, Vice President, Asset Management

The artist, Caitlin Teal Price from Washington DC, was selected to fulfill the commission of a large work to be placed in the reception area of the Two Allen Center building. Caitlin traveled to Houston this month to meet the KAC team and install her site-specific work. We sat down with Caitlin to ask about her working process and experience with the commission.

Artist Caitlin Teal Price at Two Allen Center

[KL]: How did you arrive to your unique working process?

[CTP]: I believe it was in 2017 when I started working out the scratch drawings. Previously, I made most of my work away from home and out in the world. But by 2017 I was in the middle of a life transition, and more confined to my studio. I tried a number of ways to satisfy a new studio workflow, but it wasn’t until I started using an X-ACTO blade to etch into my photographic prints that I found my flow. The marks were very crude at first and I was unsure that it would work. But it turns out that I really enjoy the process, so I kept at it. The work has evolved and continues to evolve over time and with each piece. Now I use photographs with strong compositions as the jumping off point for the etched abstractions that I work into the print. I also now use different X-ACTO blades with varying degrees of dullness to get the variation in the marks that I make. From conception to completion each work takes over a month to create.

The Artist's studio in Washington DC

[KL]: Your process is so labor intensive and must require a lot of patience. Would you say it’s meditative? Stressful? Give us some insight into the mental/emotional aspect of your practice.

[CTP]: I would say that it is both meditative and stressful and sometimes confusing and often fun and satisfying. The work takes so long to make that I have a range of emotions when I’m in the middle of it. Before I start the piece, I figure out a general plan. I make a smaller study of the work and use it as a kind of map that I can reference as I make the full-size work. I expect the work to evolve and change from the original plan, so I leave myself open to that. As I work on the final piece, I need to be aware of what marks I am making, and I need to be able to anticipate what’s next. This technique of scratching into the print is unforgiving. I cannot undo the marks, so I need to be careful and deliberate when I make them. I find that its trouble when I get too lost in thought so most of the time, I am pretty focused. Because each piece requires such long periods of sitting or standing with the work, I listen to podcasts and music to keep me company.

TYart installing Caitlin's work in the Two Allen Center lobby.

[KL]: What made you decide on this particular composition and coloration for this project?

[CTP]: When figuring out the composition for this piece, I was thinking about the space it was going to hang and who was going to occupy that space. The placement of the tryptic is above the reception desk at Two Allen Center in a large, sunny, open, beautiful room connecting the three Allen Center buildings. It is a space where people pass though busily from one meeting to the next but also pause to recharge. It is a space of energy and of rest. I wanted the piece to reflect that by suggesting movement and ambition as the shapes rise and reach out of a place of rest. The blue works are a mirror of one another suggesting community and cooperation. The orange piece bridges and connects the left and right and reads as has both weighted and light at the same I chose the colors blue and orange because when combined they are energetic and surprising while at the same time familiar and comforting.

Caitlin Teal Price's site specific commission, "Untitled (reach to rest)" in Two Allen Center.

[KL]: What was your experience like collaborating with KAC?

[CTP]: It was amazing to have the opportunity to collaborate with KAC! When working on a commission, especially of this scale, it is so important that the vision of the artist is supported and trusted, and I love that Kimberly and Julie put that trust in me.

They supported me through the entire process and gave me the freedom to make the work that I envisioned, and I cannot thank them enough for that!

Philadelphia Museum of Art Acquisition

I feel very honored to have this piece acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and super grateful for their support of my work!

Untitled (waiting for), 2021, 30x40 inches, x-acto blade etching on photographic print.

Detail of Untitled (waiting for), 2021, 30x40 inches, x-acto blade etching on photographic print.

PROCESS SPOTLIGHT

Written by Whitney Cole // Candela Gallery

Washington DC-based artist, Caitlin Teal Price has not always been so experimental with the photograph as an object; the artist returned to the tactile process after the birth of her second child led her to seek out a more “WFH”-friendly photographic workflow. In fact, Scratch Drawings is quite a step away from the glistening, tanned beach bodies of Stranger Lives or the cinematic women of Annabelle, Annabelle.

Visually, these career phases can be bridged with a clear passion for photographic structure: light, texture, and color. However, in conversations about the newer work, Price expressed a fatigue with the digital process; there’s significantly less magic with the push of a button than the materialization of the latent image in a dark room bath, or the excitement of having really created a unique object. She wanted to return to a more manual, individualistic process with her works.

After a serendipitous divergence into mark-making, Price began combining her love for light and the intimacy of the mark into the foundation of her work today.

Price’s process begins by combing through seminal photo history books, making gestural tracings of familiar forms that draw her eye. Parallel to this process, Price captures imagery of falling light coming through the old windows of her home on colored papers, creating small backdrops for the fleeting shapes. Next, she returns to the sketches and begins to pair the drawn forms and the captured images. Finally, she makes several studies of these pairings on 11x14 paper, using x-acto blades of varying sharpness to carve into the surface of photographic prints made from the colored light. Eventually, the perfect match is found, and she uses the chosen study as a reference for the larger, unique piece. Each final piece can take up to two months of meditative mark-making with an x-acto.

Over time, the work has evolved from Lego shapes from her sons’ toys to the more abstracted forms we see today. Price has introduced pencil as a way to add more dimensionality to the white of the re-exposed paper, and has begun making an even more conscious effort to allow the markings and the light to weave together and support one another.

Though Scratch Drawings initially feels like a stark departure from the photographic process, it serves more like a deconstructed ode. Each color chosen is a nod to the RGB/CMYK color scale; the scratched textures themselves are pulled from photography’s past; light, the queen of photography, is glorified with a straight portrait.

Written by Whitney Cole // Candela

A warehouse of their own: D.C. artists launch a co-working and exhibition space

The Washington Post

By Tara Bahrampour Oct. 11, 2019 at 5:18 p.m. EDT

For the past four years, as Melvin Nesbitt Jr. was coming up as a professional artist, he managed to find space in which to work. But he had a harder time finding a supportive network of fellow artists to help connect him to the larger professional scene.

A collage artist who lives in Shaw, Nesbitt, 46, applied for a spot at STABLE, a studio complex and exhibition space in Eckington that opened its doors this summer to 32 artists from around the Washington metro area.

Since then, “I’ve been offered to teach a couple of workshops and got a solo show through my association with STABLE,” Nesbitt said. “I knew this was going to be a community, and the other artists were very interested in being part of a community and interacting with each other, and that’s something I felt was missing in my life as an artist before.”

Creating a hub for artists in a city not generally associated with the concept was the primary goal of the nonprofit organization, founded by three artists — Tim Doud, Linn Meyers, and Caitlin Teal Price — who moved to the District after achieving success in other cities. Determined to counter the common wisdom that Washington was no town for artists, they set out to create a meeting ground similar to those that had helped them flourish in New York City and elsewhere.

The 10,000-square-foot space, housed in a sprawling brick building that was once a stable for a Nabisco factory, includes 21 studios for 24 artists, a shared workspace for eight more, a lounge and a 1,100-square-foot gallery space.

The artists, selected from among 150 applicants by a panel of arts professionals, range in age from their 20s to their 60s. Some have decades of experience; others are relative newcomers.

The space officially opens next week with an inaugural exhibition showcasing the work of its artists and a fundraising dance party. Some of the pieces on display refer to the District — either directly, such as the wall of giant letters reading “GO-GO BELONGS HERE,” by Nekisha Durrett, or more obliquely, such as “The Tran-harmonium, A Listening Station,” by Emily Francisco, in which 88 keys of a piano are hooked up to 43 radios tuned to different stations. In St. Louis, where Francisco used to live, that meant a lot of country music; in Washington the device captures more news.

Francisco’s studio is 163 square feet, but she built sturdy shelves into the top half to accommodate materials such as piano innards and old televisions.

Other spaces are larger, and some are shared. In a spacious loft, Andy Yoder, 61, worked on a giant fence rail plastered with real tobacco leaves and wrapped in plaid flannel, with roots at the bottom of the posts.

Yoder lives in Falls Church, Va., but the piece also reflects his childhood in Ohio horse country, “looking in from the outside at that equestrian, horsy, kind of preppy culture.” Pointing at the roots on the bottom, he said, “As fence rails sometimes do, they’ll kind of sprout new sprouts.”

When Yoder moved to the Washington area five years ago, he had trouble connecting with other artists.

“I lived in New York City for about five years, and I just had not found my tribe in this area,” he said. “In New York you’re always in conversation with other artists by putting your work out there. . . . Artists are like orchids — they need a little terrarium to thrive. There’s nothing like having other artists around you.”

For Yoder, that need has been met by sharing a studio space with Nesbitt. “I make suggestions and he gives me feedback,” Yoder said. “It’s just helpful having another set of eyes.”

Nesbitt, who is originally from Spartanburg, S.C., moved to the District 16 years ago to be with his partner. His collage-on-cardboard work features landscapes and portraits based on the housing project where he lived in elementary school. One 5-by-4-foot piece depicts two young African American boys sitting on a couch beside a man holding food stamps whose head has been replaced by the head of Uncle Sam.

The picture is based on Nesbitt’s own childhood and how it was affected by government policy.

“If there was an able-bodied adult man in the house, benefits would be cut off,” he said. Even after that rule ended, he said, “many jurisdictions down South would use it to intimidate people, and for years people believed that it was an enforceable law.”

“I once heard someone refer to the welfare system as ‘White Daddy,’ ” Nesbitt said, adding that when he was a child his father did not live with him in part because of fear that benefits would be cut off. The painting was an attempt “to acknowledge that this dad, our dad, was replaced by a welfare check.”

Not all the STABLE artists have physical studios. Eight were selected to be part of “Post Studio,” a co-working space similar to WeWork, for artists who either already have studios but want to be part of the STABLE community or who don’t need traditional studios. This group comprises visual artists and writers, including a sculptor, Mary Hill, who is currently in law school and whose piece on display, “Ethical Problems,” is a law book cast from brightly colored silicone.

One of Post Studio group’s artists, Aziza Gibson-Hunter, 65, has worked as an artist since coming to Washington 30 years ago to study printmaking at Howard University. She said she appreciates the connections she makes with younger artists at STABLE.

“I learn from their ideas,” she said. “And as a person of color I can bring my cultural experience to this, which I think is important because the artists’ organizations can get very insular.”

Most artists will have the opportunity to renew their one-year leases, for which they pay based on the number of square feet. But the facility also has spaces for visiting artists who may come for shorter periods. The founders hope to bring them in in collaboration with Washington’s embassies, many of which are interested in spreading culture across international borders.

STABLE has also had representatives from museums and galleries around the country come to visit, such as the one who will be installing Nesbitt’s solo show this December at Sense Gallery on Georgia Avenue NW.

“I think I’ve had more people coming through here than I did in five years of home visits,” said Molly Springfield, 42, an artist who lives in Adams Morgan.

That is a perk that wasn’t necessarily planned, Meyers said. “Originally we were really focused on the artists’ needs for space to work but as the project evolved we came to understand that there were collectors and curators and others who really longed for access to the studios of the art-making community.”

Standing in the cavernous space behind the studios where they were preparing for the dance party, Price had a huge smile. “Some days I’m blown away that we actually did it,” she said.

LINK TO ARTICLE

STABLE OPENS ITS DOORS IN ECKINGTON

Brightest Young Things

By KAYLEE DUGAN AND CLARISSA VILLONDO OCTOBER 15, 2019

Last January I spent an hour sitting on the floor of 336 Randolph Place NE, pouring over maps, talking about Kickstarter fundraising and spending an hour or two living in Tim Doud, Caitlin Teal Price and Linn Meyers vision. As they led me down corridors that didn’t have electricity and showed me empty, concrete rooms that were full of light, I could start to see the outline of their dream. A little over a year and a half later, STABLE, an artist studio and exhibition space located right off the Metropolitan Branch Trail in Eckington, is debuting their first gallery exhibition and throwing a grand opening celebration.

Those giant empty concrete rooms are now slices of studio spaces. They’re still full of light, but now they’re also covered with paint and car parts and tobacco leaves and spare piano equipment. Some of them are organized like little mini galleries, while others are jam packed with canvases and equipment. Wandering around the space feels like you’re hopping dimensions and peeking into another world. You never know if you’re going to walk into a room and see giant sculptures made of candy colored car parts or if you’ll be greeted by a carpet composed of egg shell slivers.

In the gallery space, all of that work comes together. Curated by Dr. Jordan Amirkhani, Dialogues is STABLE’s proof of concept. The exhibition, which pulls from every artist in the building, is wildly varied but still manages to feel cohesive. There are typographic installations, paintings inspired by childhood memories and a working piano that plays radio stations when you press down on its keys.

The differences in the work, whether its medium or subject or size, are what make the exhibition exciting. Knowing that some of this work was made under the same roof, that hammering and painting and threading and printing were done simultaneously, like some sort of art based orchestra, imbues the show with a special kind of power.

But there’s nothing quite like roaming the studios. If you can only see the exhibition, it’s still worth a trip to Eckington, but everything really clicks into gear when you see the spaces where the art is made. Watching other artists shoot the shit, pop their heads into each other spaces and share bigger studios makes STABLE’s vision feel alive. This isn’t a WeWork for artists, it’s a mad experiment.

STABLE’s grand opening soiree is Friday October 18.

Link to article

GRACE exhibition explores the intersection of art and motherhood

A very thoughtful article about my exhibition written by Janet Rems for the Fairfax Times

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For photographer Caitlin Teal Price, 2010 initiated a profoundly transformative time, both personally and artistically. Returning to Washington, D.C., after years living and working in New York City and then earning her MFA at the Yale School of Art, she fell in love, married and became the mother of two sons, now six and four.

Her newest works, on view at the Greater Reston Arts Center through Nov. 24, are a visual “memoir” of her journey as a mother at the same time she was recapturing her productivity as an artist, living and working in a new environment with a whole new set of quotidian demands.

Known for her photographic collections of people and places, these new works focus instead on objects (twisted spoons, bits of metal, porcelain and plastic)—randomly collected by her sons on regular walks together. Although much different subject matter than her earlier people-oriented works, there are connections. Akin to still lifes, they likewise are carefully constructed portraits. Similarly, they also employ a distinctive use of crisp, intensely present light and shade.

“Photography is writing with light, and you’ve always used it well. … You almost forget it’s a photograph,” said Lily Siegel, GRACE executive director and curator.

Price—a rising artist whose work has been exhibited locally at the National Portrait Gallery, American University’s Katzen Arts Center and the Corcoran Gallery of Art—sat down with Siegel, at the gallery on Nov. 10 for a “Conversation” about her work’s new directions. Ruminating on the role of her sons, Price agreed that these new works function as a visual journal of their lives during this period. “It’s honoring them, their youth and their curiosity. It’s a nice representation of them, and, also as an artist, it’s taking a part of my life back.”

Something she keenly thought about as she was working, Price, though she doesn’t want to “pigeon-hole” herself as a “mom,” recalled that as her sons “treasure hunted,” a “light bulb suddenly went off.” She became attracted to these disparate bits and pieces as “objects of desire,” the idea developed of “making something ordinary precious.”

Price also owes the title of the exhibition, “Green Is the Secret Color to Make Gold,” to her sons. It was a notion that her then-five-year-old son repeated to his younger brother to convince him that green should be his favorite color. Noting its inadvertent “alchemical allusion,” it reinforced for Price “the possibility of the ordinary becoming extraordinary.”

Reiterating that the labors of both artists and parents is an “omnipresent concern” of the photographs in the exhibition,” Siegel further linked Price’s images to the 1920s Russian art movement, “Constructivism,” which conflated art and life and “celebrated technology and constructed art.”

Although these works “expose [Price’s] life to the viewer,” Siegel confessed that she had to resist reading specific narratives into them. Instead, she urged that they also be viewed as pure images “without symbolism.”

Now working with a digital camera, Price, looking to the future, suggested that she might return to the darkroom. “I found speed, but I lost process … the idea of labor,” she said.

The exhibition also includes three of Price’s first abstract works—two large-scale minimalist drawings, created with pigment and X-Acto blade, and a striking wall sculpture, “Circadian Drive,” constructed of 35 small, interconnected tiles (small enough for her to put in a bag and work on wherever her daily life took her), also created with pigment and X-Acto blade.

Compared by Siegel in concept to David Hockney’s 1980 “Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio,” in which Hockney painted his daily drive from memory, Price, in “Circadian Drive,” drew the repeated drive to her sons’ daycare with her eyes closed. While Hockney’s colors are “jubilant,” Price’s are a more subdued grey, black and white, extracted from a photograph of a rosemary bush along the route.

This was Price’s second formal conversation with Siegel about her art work. On Oct. 7, Price and Siegel talked about her new work and the GRACE exhibition with photographer and video artist, John Pilson, at the National Gallery of Art. Pilson also is senior critic and acting director of graduate studies for fall 2018 at the Yale University School of Art. 

Green is the Secret color to make gold

From A to B

Illuminating the obscured background of our lives is of primary interest to Caitlin Teal Price. Her recent drawing Circadian Drive (A to B in 35 squares)(2018) is a depiction of the route she drove every weekday for three years. She drew with her eyes closed. “Green is the secret color to make gold,” the title of this exhibition, is a phrase repeatedly recited by the artist’s 5-year old son to his younger brother to convince him that green should be his favorite color. Note the alchemical allusion to the possibility of the ordinary becoming extraordinary. The spoons and metal, plastic, and porcelain elegantly posed in her photographs were found on routine walks taken as a young family, thrust into pockets without thought of purpose or value.

Price has primarily been recognized as a photographer of portraits and of places. She has turned her attention and camera on the way others present themselves while managing to slyly amplify that which they are trying to keep hidden. She has put herself in uncomfortable positions to put her subjects at ease. The most recent body of work offers a new perspective on her oeuvre to date. Routine, from the French word for road, has always been a part of her practice. For her series Motel (2002), she documented the interior of roadside motels, sometimes occupied by women selected by the artist, sometimes reflecting occupants just out of view; Northern Territory (2006) depicts lives full of expectation of what may be just around the corner, a liminal state empty of optimism; Annabelle, Annabelle (2009–2012) takes the road as its subject and as its object—women are posed alongside freeways, parking garages, overpasses, and street-side facades.

In the newest work, a different path emerges. Price’s most recent series, Collection (2017–2018), and the accompanying drawings in this exhibition serve as a memoir of this moment in the artist’s life. After making Stranger Lives (2008–2015) and publishing her first book, of the series, Price found herself away from New York, settling into life in Washington, DC, and with a studio for the first time ever. Admittedly, it took her three years to figure out how to be productive in this new setting. She simultaneously had less time to herself, as she was a new mother, and more time to spend alone in a space dedicated to her art making. Time became something new to explore as she settled into the routine necessary to balance the life of an Artist Mother. She returned to photographing Birds (2008 and 2015) in the archive of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. She started making drawings. The first drawings were simple schematics, pencil on paper, that later became etchings. Though Price made prints, the metal etching plates are what she considers the final work. She found a tactile interest in material and the manual labor of creating things with her hands beyond the use of a camera, the manipulation of light. She began to reflect on her life and routine.

Circadian Driveis reminiscent of David Hockney’s Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio(1980). As Hockney painted his daily drive to the studio from memory, Price drew hers, the drive to her sons’ daycare, with her eyes closed—the title a lovely nod to the daily and the circadian rhythm controlling one’s levels of alertness throughout the day. Both works express a level of comfort and freneticism in the potential of the day. In each, the route becomes an unreliable horizon and the marks of the respective artist’s hand becomes the subject. Color and rhythm express the psychic energies of the drives. Hockney’s colors are jubilant, his marks animated, the joyful anticipation of reaching the studio apparent. Price’s colors are literal, extracted from a photograph of a rosemary bush along the route; her lines are expressions of hard work that add up to an ecstatic composition of satisfied labor.

Work and the labor of artists and parents, especially mothers, is an omnipresent concern in the drawings and the photographs in this exhibition. The images of Collection are directly influenced by Constructivism, the Russian art movement of the 1920s that espoused the conflation of art and life and celebrated technology and “constructed” art. Price found herself rich with discarded objects of technology gathered by her sons and a workspace ready to be utilized. It is easy to read the selection of objects as allegorical—twisted spoons as frustrated attempts at caregiving, the humble stake wreathed in gilded wire and elevated to trophy, the ambulatory wasp astride the coin of no value, porcelain and plastic, the high and low of domesticity. Instead, the story is written by the objects without symbolism. It is a tale of the quotidian. Price has bravely and generously exposed her life to the viewer with a gentle invitation to be self-reflexive and notice the things that define an existence.

- Lily Siegel, Curator and Executive Director @ The Greater Reston Art Center

National Gallery of Art

So honored to be invited to be conversation with John Pilson and Lily Siegel at the National Gallery of Art. We discuss photography and my solo exhibition Green is the Secret Color to Make Gold. on view September 29 - November 24th, 2018 at GRACE

The Audio Recording is now archived on the National Gallery’s website

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An interview I did with Jon Feintein of Humble arts Foundation about Stranger Lives

New Photobook Captures New York City Sunbathers as Curious Specimens

From 2008 to 2015, Caitlin Teal Price photographed strangers sunbathing on New York City beaches under stark, immaculate rays. Shot from above with her medium format camera, her subjects lay back with eyes closed, presumably unaware of the photographer's presence. They exist for viewers to ogle and observe, to draw our own conclusions about their personal stories, to look without permission. Price recently published a monograph of the series, Stranger Lives with Capricious Books, which piqued our interest to learn more about her process and metaphors at work. 

Jon Feinstein: How did this project start?

Caitlin Teal Price: I started the series in the summer of 2008, in between my first and second years of grad school at the Yale School of Art. The semester before I had become really interested in the idea of the stranger, specifically the presentation of a stranger and how an apposing stranger (me) reads into what she sees. I was fascinated by what I could I tell about someone simply by the way they looked, what they carried with them and how they presented themselves to the world. I suppose the surface of something and the way it appears is the essence of photography – so perhaps subconsciously I was attempting to get back to the roots of a photograph. Previously, the way I had been finding my strangers was by going from house to house knocking on doors. I would knock on a door and I ask if I could come in to photograph them. The knocking project was more exciting to me than the pictures were good, so I scraped the approach. When I found myself on the beach the following summer, I knew I had the perfect strangers to photograph.

JF: Why NYC beaches specifically? 


CTP: I tried to photograph on other beaches around the country, California, Florida, Delaware, even other beaches in New York, but there is something undoubtedly special about Coney Island and Brighton beach. There is a wonderful rawness of people in New York City. On the other beaches I visited people were almost too put-together, it’s as if they were expecting to be photographed. The people on Coney and Brighton lay out as if nobody is looking. Some people just roll out of the Subway and on to the beach with what they happen to be carrying, sometimes without a bathing suit or towel. In addition, Coney and Brighton are packed full of people, and the people are incredibly diverse. This is something I paid attention to when choosing my subjects, I wasn’t interested in photographing the same type of person over and over
again.

JF: What's behind the title "Stranger Lives"? 


CTP: The series is about the lives of strangers, so it seemed fitting. But, some viewers may read the word “stranger” as weirder. Which is fine too.

JF: How close are you getting to your subjects? Has anyone "caught" you photographing them? If so, what's the response been?


CTP: I ask every single person I photograph. And about 50% of the people I ask say ”Yes.” It would be WAY to scary not to ask. I don’t photograph the people who say “No.” I don’t like the idea of sneaking a picture – especially in this scenario. In fact, I want to been seen. I specifically wear a red dress so that people can see me walking toward and away from them. I find that wearing the red dress is less threatening than my usual black. I am extremely close when I take the photograph, directly over them, in fact. I hover on my tippy toes while hand holding my Mamiya RZ 6x7 camera. I still use
film.

JF: The light has a crazy, revealing quality to it. Are you using flash or are these lit by the sun?


CTP: They are lit by the sun. I photograph from about 12-2pm so that the sun is high and bright in the sky. Because I hand hold the camera I have to shoot at a 1/1000 of a second to avoid camera shake (due to the heavy camera + tippy toe hover). In order to get the sharp focus and depth of field I shoot with an aperture of F22. It’s all very calculated. The fine details are really important to the images, so I make sure the lighting elevates
them.

JF: What draws you to look at+ photograph strangers in this specimen-like way?


CTP: Like I mentioned, I am really interested in the presentation of a person and what her body may reveal about her life. What stories do the scars, wrinkles and markings on the skin reveal? How does what she surround herself with add to the
narrative? The specimen like aspect offers us opportunity and gives us permission to stare and to wonder about the lives of these strangers.


JF: Are these purely voyeuristic, or is something else at play? 


CTP: They are pretty voyeuristic, and I have to admit that what drew me to these people in first place was the desire to stare, but as the series has grown I believe that there is more at play. I really appreciate the leveling affect that the beach has, and that these images have. Even though there is a wide range of age, race and class in these photographs all of the people are viewed in the same way. Lying on their backs, eyes closed and from above. They become one, the work speaks to humanity as a whole and how despite all of our differences we are all very much the same.

JF: This might be an obvious question, but do you see any dialogue b/t this work and Martin Parr's Life's a Beach?


CTP: While both bodies of work were made at the beach, I see the approach and mission as different. And this is probably over simplifying, but to me Parr is specifically exploring the beach as a culture, while for me the beach is a place to explore people in a more general sense. I am not attached to the beach as a location where as I think for Parr it is central. I was (still am) more interested in the line between confidence and vulnerability. How our possessions and our personal presentation often give us confidence, but as humans we are inherently vulnerable. I am interested in the tension between confidence and vulnerability seen through the lives of strangers. When I think about it, I feel like this work may have more in common with Parr’s Common Senseseries.

JF: On the surface, this work seems very different from your other series. How do you see Stranger Lives fitting into your larger practice?


CTP: Visually yes, Stranger Lives is very different from my other portrait work. But, the core ideas remain the same. I enjoy making visually different kinds of work, it keeps my practice fresh and I don’t get bored.