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James Baker Hall: Orphans In
The Attic
The following text is taken from the catalog accompanying Hall's 1995
exhibit
at the University of Kentucky Art Museum.
This work is used with the permission of James Baker Hall.
| From
the Acknowledgements by Harriet W. Fowler, Director of the Museum: |
|
| James Baker Hall has been described as a writer who takes pictures and as a photographer who writes. Both descriptions are correct—he is a remarkable artist working in two diverse media. An award-winning professor of English at the University of Kentucky, he was educated there and at Stanford University, where he held a Wallace Stegner Writing Fellowship in 1960-61. | |
| "Deeply transformed," as he notes, by his friendship with Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Hall learned a great deal from the Lexington optician/photographer who has recently received such richly deserved international acclaim for his photographic work. Meatyard was the subject of a monograph by Hall as was Minor White, Hall's colleague at the Massachusett's Institute of Technology in the late 1960s and early 1970s. | |
| From
the Introduction by Roger Rawlings, Freelance writer/editor who is the author of The Last Airmen: |
|
| For James Baker Hall, the camera is an instrument of exploration. He uses it as a physicist/poet might an electron microscope, peering into the hidden interstices of phenomena, seeking that final, minutest portal past which the disjunction between matter and energy—perhaps between matter and spirit—is healed. The images he captures seem to manifest realities that normally lie beyond the limits of perception. | |
| The raw material Hall worked with came from within his family album—snapshots of Hall's grandparents, his parents, and Hall himself as a child. Passing these remembrances across his view finder, Hall has created revelations of the photographer's vision turned back upon itself: photographs of photographs. | |
| To discover what lay behind the snapshots' black-and-white representations of his past—behind, that is, the appearances accessible to ordinary sight—Hall sorted the old pictures, combining them and reshooting the combinations, cutting away parts, adding marks of emphasis, recording the reflections of natural lighting on the glossy surfaces, standing images in front of one another and peering at them through a lens held open while his breath stirred them, or introducing swatches of color where his intuition told him it was right, or.... He used the inner eye to compensate for the deficiencies of the outer, revealing in the present what had been hidden in the past. | |
| The products of this act of revelation are affirmative, conferring benediction. Heartfelt, bold, the photographs speak to us deeply, unsettling us with their intimations of pain and hard inquiry. But simultaneously they console us with the closure that derives from truth. We recognize ourselves in these images, and we discover our own heart's story. These are photographs that enlarge the scope of our vision, showing us what we always knew but could not see. | |