Equivalent Simulation: A Conversation with John Opera

Abstract

John Opera is an American photographer who works at the intersection of photographic materiality and light-derived abstraction. Since graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (where he earned an MFA), Opera has lived and worked in Chicago. His work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions in New York (2013), Los Angeles (2014), and Miami (2014). The preoccupation of his practice in the last few years has centered on the relationship between the material origins of photographic processes and the way those processes can be manipulated to express form, texture, and tone. Drawing on the most primitive components of imagemaking, Opera has reclaimed processes such as the anthotype and cyanotype and applied them to the representation of abstractions as well as everyday objects. Especially in his recent work, Opera addresses the peculiarity of organic, light-sensitive materials that give rise to two-dimensional tableaus. For this reason, many of his recent pieces evoke the parameters, conditions, and effects of paintings. In order to reflect on these latest projects, especially in the light of his long history of work as a photographer, I discussed the origins and development of Opera's work with him during the winter of 2014, via phone and email. DAVID LAROCCA: You're a photographer who is known for working at what might be called the origins of imagemaking-that is, with light-sensitive organic material, indeed with the most elemental or rudimentary attributes of photographic media. What are you working on now? JOHN OPERA: In an exhibition held in Los Angeles in the fall of 2014, (1) I showed wall works that are cyanotype-on-linen--a process that I've been exploring since 2011. During this period of experimentation and production, I've been continually drawn to artists whose work returns to photography's chemical origins while simultaneously questioning tendencies in art photography today that deemphasize surface and materiality. I'm reminded here of Barbara Kasten's cyanotype and Van Dyke brown photogenic paintings from the mid-to-late 1970s (for example, Untitled 74/13 from 1974) as well as Liz Deschenes's silver-toned sculptural/photographic works (Stereographs #1-4 from 2013). Cyanotype is one of the oldest and most recognizable of all photo processes, in part owing to its signature Prussian blue color. With this latest work, however, I've managed to modify the steps of the process so the results are not blue per se, but almost neutral. This shift in coloration is exciting (for me at least!) because it will allow me to continue experimenting with the physicality of the process but not be bogged down by such a limited, even cliche, color palette--although I do love the color blue. It's an incredibly simple process as it only requires water as a developing agent. Some pieces are framed and some are not. None are behind glass. Some are in small editions while others are unique. These cyanotypes seem to exist somewhere between painting and photography. Their physical qualities trade between those two representational worlds or models. They feel both indexical and also strangely free of referentiality. DL: I can't help but see an apparent and appealing coincidence between the Blinds images (2014) and the kinds of photographs commonly made in a chemical darkroom without negatives--namely, contact prints. Do you have a sense of the resonance of this latest work with your earliest images, made when you were a teenager growing up in Buffalo, New York? JO: I suppose there is a stylistic similarity between how my photo works look and how photograms look, and technically speaking, all of the cyanotype prints are contact prints, meaning the negative required to make my images must be the same dimensions as the final format size. If I want my final image to be 3 by 4 feet, my negative must also be that size. Deschenes's work may be instructive here, especially in how she addresses issues of tone and silhouette as they are expressed in response to light--for instance, in her cameraless photograph Moire #25 (2009). …