Artemisians Talk: The Photo Co-op After a Year

The Artemisia Photo Co-op was formed last summer as a special group within the larger Artemisia group. On May 7, Gretchen Garner spoke with members Carol Turchan, Laurel Ross, Esther Parada, Jane Wenger, and Helena Chapellin-Wilson, as well as the Gallery director, Elaine King, about the co-op and about themselves as women artists. (Members Mary Baber, Lialia Kuchma, and Patty Carroll were not present.)

GARNER: Chicago has had a history of two very well-established women’s galleries; Artemisia especially has been successful. But by the summer of 1976, there was a question of whether this was a viable thing anymore, a women’s group. I’d like to know what motivated the establishment of another women’s group within Artemisia. Were men considered?

CAROL TURCHAN: The first reason that we decided to form a photo group specifically was that Carole Harmel and I felt that there wasn’t very much emphasis on photography in the existing group. We felt that there should be more photographers, and we weren’t able to impress that importance on the rest of the members.

L to R: Helena Chapellin-Wilson, Jane Wenger, Esther Parada, Elaine King, Laurel Ross, and Carol Turchan.

And also, Carole Harmel was rather interested in men in the gallery, and she thought that when we did begin selecting members, perhaps we should consider men as well. The by-laws of the gallery allow for some time in the future opening up to men, but most of the members felt that it wasn’t time. We decided to stick to our original goals.

GARNER: I take it that those goals are still to provide women with places to show, because women are still being discriminated against in the art establishment?

JANE WENGER: I don’t feel that that’s true anymore. I don’t feel that I’m in the women’s group in that kind of way. I personally joined the gallery as much for a place to show, and for me, this has served my purposes, so that’s fine with me. I think that when you say women separately, you say men separately too, and I’m not into that. I like more integration than that.

ESTHER PARADA: You know, that was also an issue because several of the people we spoke to about joining the gallery felt that they would not join it as a women’s gallery, so that was an added motivation for us to attempt to make a change. I have more mixed feelings than Jane does. I don’t feel a need to belong to a women’s gallery, and I certainly wouldn’t have minded men. But I also see how much this means to women (and not only the women in the gallery) and the sense of what they’ve accomplished, because it has a history, and it’s gone through a lot of changes in terms of its reputation, in terms of the confidence that the women who are members have, what they develop. And I think that is happening as a women’s gallery through the support of women.

GARNER: The women who didn’t want to be in a women’s group what were some of their objections?

ELAINE KING: I have some insight. I talked with several people. There were a few things. One, they were afraid of the stigma. They were afraid that once they were associated with a women’s gallery, commercial galleries would be reluctant to take them on. Another thing was time. The women felt they could be associated with the gallery on some sort of peripheral level but could not see coming to meetings, the time commitment involved.

LAUREL ROSS: There is a fear of stigma to a co-op gallery, and I think it’s necessary to keep it separate the female issue and the co-op.

KING: Another thing, a couple of women thought the shows were just so uneven in the galleries, both at ARC and Artemisia, and they wanted to be associated with a gallery that would have only top shows.

PARADA: The prestige, in other words. One woman was adamant about the feeling that a women’s co-op was very protective of its members, that there was a reluctance to face the conflict that they would face in a mixed situation. I don’t know that that is necessarily true. I mean, there is plenty of conflict in the gallery.

HELENA CHAPELLIN-WILSON: As a matter of fact, I joined the photo gallery because I considered the members of the gallery to work on a very high level, and I would like to associate with a group of people in terms of that quality.

WENGER: I feel the reason that members of the gallery do not want to open to men now is that they feel that they can assert themselves with women, but with men, they might not be able to do it.

GARNER: Many things being written today say that at the beginning stages of involvement in the women’s movement, there is a strong sense of solidarity, but there always comes a point when you realize you are in competition with each other. Especially if you’re in the same field. What happens when that issue raises its head?

WENGER: My feelings are that we’re not really competitive but are supportive of each other, and that happens to be one of the nice things. There doesn’t ever have to be anything to compete for in that kind of way.

PARADA: What is it that we really compete for? Jobs are something, but in terms of outside shows, that’s not a limited commodity.

ROSS: But if one person in the gallery somehow surfaces as a star? Then that might easily cause resentment among the members I don’t know, but it might. But here, we have a certain kind of personality. It’s not particularly one of clawing one’s way to the top.

GARNER: As a matter of fact, your work is all very different.

KING: Yes, you each have your unique thing, and there’s a curiosity about each other. You’re giving each other exposure to experiences, like Helena’s gum prints or Esther’s processes or the way Carol works. There’s a bouncing off one another.

WENGER: The thing is, you can learn from each other if you’re not so afraid that if you say how you do something, someone is going to steal your essence or something. Really!

CHAPELLIN-WILSON: It doesn’t concern me that someone steals an idea, but how I’m going to go over that, what is my next step? If someone is doing or trying to do the same thing as you, it is because it has a certain value. No one copies something bad.

GARNER: I’d like to talk now about the work, maybe about your first show. You chose “self-portraits” as your way of introducing yourselves to the world. Is there a special significance to that?

TURCHAN: I guess we thought it was a good way of introducing not only our work but our persons. And it was something we could all put together quickly because we were really forming right up to the last minute.

GARNER: I’m interested in the concept of a self-portrait show in terms that many people say that women are better in touch with themselves than men. That they have a more intimate understanding of themselves and can present their inner selves better than most men the old cliche that men are focused on the outer world and women on the inner world. How do you react to that idea?

WENGER: I think in a way that that’s less true of artists.

GARNER: That most male artists are more in touch with themselves than males are in the general population?

WENGER: That’s right.

GARNER: But I think in the world of art, there are still those who would make that distinction. If you listen to people like Miriam Shapiro talk, for example. She traces her development as an artist from the period when she was doing her extremely geometric, hard-edge, brutally precise paintings, when she felt she was going along with the male art-world in that type of expression. It was only when she felt free to be a woman as an artist that she turned to colored fabrics and smaller scale, etc.

ROSS: She just put those names to what happened to her; she just decided to call that male and female. It’s really arbitrary, she could have called it her formal period and her informal period. There were obvious good reasons for calling it that… she was well-known.

GARNER: She got a lot of feminist mileage out of it.

PARADA: You could think of someone like Diane Arbus as opposed to Lucas Samaras and, I mean, Samaras’ work is very narcissistic and he is very involved with himself, his own body, it is intimate in scale, and decorative. Arbus’ work doesn’t involve any examination of herself.

WENGER: But Arbus still reveals everything.

PARADA: But it takes a kind of objective form.

GARNER: Its very outer-directed, aggressive, and brave. In a social way to do the kind of work that she did. Now Anne Tucker in The Woman’s Eye makes an interesting point, she separates her people between those who made their lives as women a very important part of their images and those who denied their lives as women. For example, Arbus, Bourke-White, or Abbott. She talks about them as artists who were either androgynous or wouldn’t let their femaleness surface at all.

WENGER: But maybe that means to transcend in a way, not that it’s “maleness” or “femaleness.”

PARADA: But there is a definite impulse. I remember 10 years ago or so when someone said ‘You have a man’s mind,’ beaming with pride… whatever it meant! There are women who have been very conscious of that label and have worked very hard to overcome it. But let me say one other thing; as a teacher I see my beginning students come into class with very fixed notions of what is suitable for photography and it tends not to be personal kinds of things. If I look at a contact sheet and say “What’s that?” they’ll say, “Oh, that’s just my kid.” That feeling of not bringing their own lives into their work is something that is in our culture.

GARNER: I’d like to tentatively suggest that a real contribution women have made in the last two or three decades is that they have expanded the photographic genres. Esther, your own work with your child. Laurel.

A: But this feeling for an intimate environment is a long tradition in the arts. Even the Cubists, Picasso’s picture of the mother and child taking his first steps. It’s not his experience, he’s not in there, but it’s very much something that derives from a family experience.

GARNER: Interesting that some women artists who have concerned themselves with maternity have not had their own children, Cassatt, for example. Helena, there are many children in the pictures in your show.

CHAPELLIN-WILSON: I’ll tell you what happened, in those pictures, it was a sort of regression to my own childhood. I realized it when I saw them all together. It was incredible. I really would like to have a child, but I would always be conscious of the gap that is always going to exist between a child and a mother.

PARADA: A friend of mine who teaches at Francis Parker has observed that the girls tend to be very conscientious, do all their tasks well, but they do not get as involved in one kind of thing as boys do. I really feel that to be true, and that is a problem that I have, for whatever reason, and it is certainly partly cultural to keep track of so many little things. It’s debilitating. It’s almost like a nervous habit in terms of concentration patterns. Sometimes I feel like that guy on Ed Sullivan, who had all those plates spinning in the air.

GARNER: It can happen without children too, we’re socialized to be the service half of everything. We’ll do the cooking, and we’ll clean up afterward.

PARADA: I must say, I think that works to the benefit of the gallery. It’s really a nice environment. I’d like to return to imagery, there’s no need to dwell on the maternal theme since more than half the people here don’t have children. Jane, I’d like you to talk about your male nudes, their lack of heads, the low point of view that makes them look like the Colossus of Rhodes…

WENGER: It started by doing female nudes, and I’ve done them on and off since I was first in photography, for about 13 years. I got more and more interested in photographing men, but I was shy about it, I thought about it a couple of years before I ever did it. When I first started to do it I did it in the same way I did my female nudes. And then I got more and more interested in male bodies, the tension of the muscles, etc. The heads were eliminated from the beginning, even in the female nudes, and I think the reason for that is because I’m not interested in personality, I want to transcend that. I’m interested in the tension, the sense of imbalance, like a sense of falling and trying to hang on. I like the mysteriousness of not having a head to say this is a person.

GARNER: What about the erotic tension?

WENGER: I don’t know how to answer that.

GARNER: Laurel, about your new self-portraits: I see in your work a kind of cycle, Self-portraits, then a series of empty landscapes, and then the self-portraits again. These now are remarkable because of their enormous size and their close-up honesty. You have not provided us with a standard pretty face.

ROSS: Yes, there is a cycle, and the self-portraits somehow provide me with a re-charging. I don’t usually show the self-portraits, but when I do it has been as postcards or something. But this spring I was having problems, psychological, emotional, financial, and I started photographing myself a lot with a large camera, a 4 by 5. It was important to just look at my face, how I looked. It was really important and really cathartic. Anyway, now I’m in the process of making all that into a product, into art, and that’s a very different thing. Now I’m looking at them as objects rather than process.

Gretchen Garner is a photographer currently teaching at Saint Xavier College.