Grant Mudford
Australian , 1944- (active America )
Chris Burden , 1989
silver gelatin print
SBMA, Gift of Barry Sloane
2009.74.1
Chris Burden, the subject of Mudford's photograph, during the performance of his 1974 piece Trans-fixed where he was nailed to the back of a Volkswagen
RESEARCH PAPER
Though world renowned for his architectural photography, Grant Mudford has been doing photographic portraiture for as long as he has been making photographs. He has done them for himself as well as for commercial purposes, from photographing rock musicians for the Australian Rolling Stones Magazine to fashion shoots to posters for art exhibits. However, he has taken no snapshots of his family, his dog, Bobby, or even photos of his own house, because when he takes pictures, he feels compelled to make them works of art - his passion for photography makes it impossible for him to take casual photos.
Mudford was born in Sydney, Australia in 1944. The high school he attended had no art classes, though he taught himself photography at an early age and was developing his own photos when he enrolled in an architectural school right out of high school. There, he became fascinated by art-making. He had not thought of photography as art before then, but his talent was recognized by his instructors and he was encouraged to cultivate that talent rather than pursue a career in architecture.
Mudford enjoyed success as a commercial photographer in his native Australia, but there was not much opportunity there for artistic expression in that medium, and he moved to the U.S. in 1974 with a grant from the Australian government. After travelling around the country in a van for about five years taking photographs, he settled in Los Angeles, where he lives still. He believes that in the last 20 years, Southern California has become the world's leading art-making community for cutting-edge, contemporary artists with its outstanding art schools.
Mudford has made a name for himself with his monumental and iconic architectural images. His earlier works are in black and white, but he now shoots in color, sometimes using large format film and sometimes digital photography for commercial work. In recent years, he has received recognition for his series of photographs of the Disney Concert Hall by architect Frank Gehry (completed 2003).
In the mid-1980s, as now, Rosamund Felsen was exhibiting Grant Mudford's work at her gallery in Santa Monica, along with the work of other up-and-coming Los Angeles artists. In a 1993 LA Times article, Drohojowska-Philp wrote, "The Rosamund Felsen Gallery . . . has gained a reputation over the last decade for its roster of tough-minded artists who consider issues of sex and death, religion and politics to be their inevitable fodder." Mudford began formulating a concept for a portrait suite of 15 edgy LA artists associated with the Rosamund Felsen Gallery, including himself. In a 1983 interview with Jacqueline Perren of The Trade, Mudford said, "It's totally resolved in my mind. All I have to do is get through the mechanics . . . I do need some very powerful studio lighting before continuing further with this type of project." However, he had already begun to produce prototypes for the series.
Mudford had always used strong directional light to create a sense of drama in his photos, but for these portraits, he chose to eliminate the sense of dramatic lighting, making it more about information than theatrics. He wanted the light to be directionless, frozen and clear. To achieve this, he placed a large "soft box" equidistant on either side of his subjects, facing them. This created a soft wash that wrapped around the individual, minimizing shadows. The lights can be seen reflected in the subjects' eyes.
To instill calmness in his subjects, Mudford played classical music, instructed them to relax and look not at, but through the camera. He says his subjects passively submitted to the scrutiny of the camera and none were insecure about the outcome. Though some provided feedback, the final choice of what was printed was Mudford's. He knew them well; they were a close-knit group and they trusted him.
The portrait of Chris Burden exemplifies what Mudford was looking for and he feels that it is one of the best of the series. Burden was a performance artist in the 1970's, probably most famous at the time for having himself shot in the arm by a friend in 1971. He abandoned his often masochistic and controversial performances when it became apparent to him that they were losing their effectiveness as commentary on contemporary social and political systems, turning to assemblages, installations and sculptures as a creative outlet for his provocative art. Visitors to the LA County Art Museum will likely be familiar with Burden's striking 2008 installation of restored antique streetlamps from LA outside the entrance to the museum, titled "Urban Light".
Like all of the photos in the series, The Burden portrait is very large (________), the subject is facing directly toward the viewer in a full frontal pose with just the head and shoulders in the frame on a neutral background. The details are almost painfully sharp - nothing is obscured. Its rawness, its intimacy, its sense that Burden is being exposed to our scrutiny for identification, may bring to mind a mug shot, and that was Mudford's intent. The large format and the lack of depth created by the neutral background and absence of shadows pushes Burden's image forward into our space. The stark lighting and clarity of the print picks out every detail - his moles, the furrows in his brow, the stubble of his beard, the strands of his hair, eyebrows and eyelashes, even the pores of his skin. This, along with the directness of Burden's gaze and his expressionless face may make the viewer uncomfortable with the forced intimacy of the photograph, and perhaps make it seem confrontational, like Burden's art.
In a USC Fisher Gallery catalog, Transfictions , Emma Acker wrote about Mudford, ". . . for him, a photograph can contain tension and energy through disciplined and thoughtful framing and composition." Though she was writing about a much later exhibit of his architectural work, it seems to equally apply to this photo and the others in the suite.
In spite of the unrelenting honesty that the camera reveals about the physical appearance of these 15 artists and what Mudford wanted to communicate about them, there is still deception - the message that looks can be deceiving. Mudford's artist subjects dressed as they liked for their photos. Renée Petropoulos had just returned from a trip to Turkey and brought a Turkish wedding outfit to wear. Jeffrey Vallance, who had purchased and then buried a frozen hen in a pet cemetery, dressed like a banker, a persona he adopted to gain access to influential people. Mike Kelley has a gentle, almost Christ-like appearance in his photo, though his art is often disturbing, even demonic. John Boskovich asked for 30 seconds notice so he could drop to the floor and do push-ups to accentuate his muscles before the photo was shot.
Until Mudford began to work in color, he developed his own prints. For this series, he wanted the maximum fidelity he could achieve with large prints, so he chose to use a point-light source photographic enlarger unit usually employed in the graphic arts industry, a technique other printers avoid because it reveals a lot of flaws in film, such as dust, making it very difficult to produce good prints. For that reason and because the paper is no longer available, there is only one set of these portraits and they cannot be duplicated.
This portrait series of 15 artists was intended by Mudford to remain intact as a unit of artistic expression and it had been exhibited in this way at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery. However, when Barry Sloane showed a particular interest in the photograph of Chris Burden, he reluctantly agreed to break up the set and sell it to him. In 2009, SBMA came to an agreement with the Rosamund Felsen Gallery for the other 14 portraits and Sloane made a gift of the Burden portrait so that the entire suite of portraits is once again united.
The 15 artists represented in the series include: Chris Burden, John Boskovich, Paul McCarthy, Mark Pally, Karen Carson, Renee Petropoulos, Erika Rothenberg, Jeff Gambill, Roy Dowell, Lari Pittman, Steve Rogers, Mike Kelley, Richard Jackson, Jeffery Vallance and Grant Mudford (photographed by Reece Vogel).
Bibliography
Interview with Grant Mudford. Laura Six-Stallings and Gail Stichler, August 3, 2010.
Acker, Emma, et al. Transfictions: Jack Butler, Eillen Cowin, and Grant Mudford , exh. cat. Los Angeles, CA: Fisher Gallery, University of Southern California, 2004. Print.
Ayres, Anne, and Paul Schimmel. Chris Burden: A Twenty year Survey , exh. cat. Newport, CA: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1988. Print.
Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter. "The Art of the Dealer." Los Angeles Times , 12 Sept. 1993. Web. ( http://articles.latimes.com/1993-09-12/entertainment/ca-34447_1_rosamund-felsen-gallery )
Perren, Jacqueline. Interview, The Trade , Los Angeles, March 1983, pp 8-9. Web. ( http://www.rosamundfelsen.com/articles.php?artist_id=12#artl152 )
Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, "The Art of the Dealer." Los Angeles Times , 12 Sept. 1993. ( http://articles.latimes.com/1993-09-12/entertainment/ca-34447_1_rosamund-felsen-gallery )
Jacqueline Perren, Interview, The Trade, Los Angeles, March 1983. pp 8-9. ( http://articles.latimes.com/1993-09-12/entertainment/ca-34447_1_rosamund-felsen-gallery )
Emma Acker, "Grant Mudford: Bridging the Theoretical Divide", Transfictions (Los Angeles, 2004) p. 52.