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4/12/2003

John Dugdale

John Stevenson Gallery, New York

A Ten Year Retrospective, 1993-2003
December 4, 2003 - January 17, 2004

John Dugdale is one of the most accomplished and successful artists represented by our gallery. We are proud to host the first retrospective exhibition of his photographs, works created 1993-2003.

Ten years ago, suffering a series of AIDS-related illnesses, then suddenly and permanently losing almost all of his vision, John was at first devastated. But a remark he made to console his mother became his epiphany. "Maybe if I just change the way I work, I can be the best blind photographer."

No longer able to see through a camera's viewfinder, nor to make enlargements in a darkroom, John began to use an antique 8 x 10" plate camera. Until then the old camera had only been a decoration in his studio. But John realized it could project a large image on its ground glass, and this enabled him, with special eyeglasses and a magnifying loupe, to slowly scan and compose a photograph. The camera produced large 8 x 10" negatives, which John could contact-print to handcoated, sensitive papers.

To make his prints, John turned to some of photography's earliest, most straightforward processes -- the cyanotype, with his rich blue tones, invented by William Fox Talbot in the 1830's; the platinum print, used by Stieglitz and his Photosecession group; the albumen print, made of silver salts in egg whites coated to paper; and another 19th century process, the printing-out paper, which today is still made by a small studio in England.

John changed one more way of working. He learned to make his images from the inside -- inspired by his memories of what he he had seen before his blindness; by the poems of Whitman, Emerson, St. Vincent Millay, Thoreau; and above all, by his own deep emotions.

Working steadily over the years, John has created a body of work that is unprecedented. From each of his previous exhibitions, prints have gone into major collections and museums, and the many books illustrated with John's images have taken them worldwide.

Today, despite his handicaps, John will tell you that he is one of the luckiest people in the world. He is a successful, self-supporting artist. He can do what he loves. He knows who his friends are. And he is still here.

This exhibition of John's work commemorates a milestone: the first decade of his new life. In preparation, John revisited every photograph he created in those ten years. He has selected 50 for this special occasion. Among them are several of his well best-known, best beloved images. But most have never been exhibited before.

John has named this exhibition "The Spirit Eye". For the cover of our announcement card, John brought us a quotation from Thoreau which has personal meaning to him. "Our truest life is when we are in our dreams awake."

John says the quotation describes his own experience. Since his illnesses, and in his blindness, he has come to understand what it is, to be a spirit living in the world.

And the dreamlike image illustrating the card, one of John's cyanotypes, is a self portrait that John made in 1999. He is on the porch of his old house in Stone Ridge, New York, along the Hudson valley. The beautiful light is twilight, almost moonlight. John's title for this image is from Walt Whitman. "Smile, for your lover comes."

John Stevenson Gallery
338 West 23rd Street
New York
212 352 0070
212 741 6449

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