Linda Connor

A response to a lecture by Linda Connor.

I have to say: Linda Connor’s images are very moving.

There is also a part of me that thinks that they play the “exotic & nostalgic” cards very prominently, and while that is not a flaw in and of itself, it is something that sets me on edge. Kind of like when you go to a movie and you just know that it’s going to be a tear jerker, you sort of brace for it, or embrace it, or… whatever, but that facet of the product becomes a prominent feature that you are faced with whenever you engage it. Likewise, this exotic nostalgia is a palpable feature of Mrs. Connor’s works.

That’s not to say that I’m not deeply affected by it. I am. There is a kind of deeply glowing reverie infused into her images. It may be the toning of her POP papers (I heard her say what it was… gold bromide? gold sulfide..? gold something – and so the hue), but it is not only the toning of the prints. While walking back from the lecture and feeling the pull her pictures exerted on me, – like a song in my head, instead of hearing it over and over I remained still with the feeling they’d lured me into – I began to try to tease apart the mechanics of the experience.

I think that what I felt was what someone should feel when the medium and the message are so perfectly in sync. The treatment serves to supercharge the delivery of the content.

Like what? Like the fact that her camera and optics are relics, that the process she printed with is a thing of the past as well. The toning of the image – generally unusual now, also has historic roots. Oratones, and other “golden” images just aren’t as common as they’ve once been (even though never “common”, the process is a positive rarity today) . To many of us sitting in that audience even a thing such as contact printing 8×10 negs, while far from “a thing of the past” is still something we think of as verging on the arcane. In these works Linda Connor had certainly and consciously embraced these “by-gone-era” methods in order to further the impact of her photographs.

These “old” practices tied so indelibly to a sense of Time server to set the tone, to prime the mind’s eye, to sensitize the viewer to the message. The photos are united around a Time as a measure, a scale and as a heuristic. Time is the organizing principle of humanity in a stable relationship to place. Her pictures are specifically of things that have either been “here” for an awful long time, or are eminently transient.

She shows us people, in her works sort of like the smallest measure of time – a lifetime, and she shows us the kinds of things we think of as being permanent, eternal, or so much greater than ourselves in terms of years that they seem effectively so. The ruins, land eroding, cultural ritual, man’s marks in stone, burial practices, the human spirit, the spirits of nature, the cosmos. Time is unspooled like yarn and used to string us along until we understand that what she’s pointing at are the organizing Principles of … the Universe. The pictures point out particulars of the human experience that seem to clearly be extensions of, or in resonance with, that overarching order. Land, man, sky, animal, all these things that grow and flow, ebb and wane. Things that exist as cycles within cycles, things that die and even in death remain.

I find it hard not to be totally, unconditionally, enamored of her work. Those things she speaks of, are after all universally present and underpinning the existence of mankind. My own included, or so I feel.

Yet at the same time there is a part of me that just wants to be given the facts without all the whistles and bells, without the sentimentality. The problem with this impulse is that sentiment cannot be separated from the human condition so easily as if it were a trifle.

She did say that she’s always been a romantic at heart… I guess she’s found mine by the same vein.