JoAnn Verburg

This looks like potentially pretty interesting work.

After toiling away for many years as part of the Minnesota Photo Mafia (well, "toiling" in Italy as well as wintry Minnesota...), JoAnn Verburg currently has a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art (this is the sort of show I wish I could just take part of a Wednesday afternoon to pop down and look at...).

She has a long record of projects and shows, going back to Mark Klett's Rephotographic Survey Project in the 1970's and having shows at Pace/Macgill etc

Her pictures describe spaces and moments suspended in the reverie that precedes action. Like a Leyden jar, they are containers of potential. - John Szarkowski

As people may have guessed by now I'm pretty interested in using blur, differential focus, narrow focus, movement and complexity/screens to break away from the sharp from foreground to background approach to photography, as well as trying to break the hold of perspectivism on my photography.

This seems pretty hard to do effectively - especially to do in a way that isn't overly contrived or "twee" (as my grandmother would have said). Verburg seems to manage to do this quite successfully in much the work I have seen online

I also like the way most of her diptychs/triptychs work - they don't feel at all forced.

From an article on MNArtists.org:

A little deceptive, and always somewhat elusive, there is nothing easy, obvious, or spontaneous about these images. Each one appears constructed with a deliberation and care that demands a similar sort of attention from us when we view them. We can see this kind of meticulousness in Verburg’s manipulation of focus. In many of the olive tree photos, she varies the camera’s focus so deftly that the seeming simplicity of a tangle of branches or cluster of leaves is belied by a whole host of visual shifts. It’s a very subtle form of choreography, in which the images are composed not by their content, but instead by Verburg’s delicate fiddling.

We see this best in Campello Olive Trees for Giulio (2003), in which a small olive tree stands alone in the bottom center of the image. The dead center of the tree is in focus, but the rest is clouded in a halo of blur; in the extreme right corner, half of an olive branch is in sharp focus. Meanwhile the upper half of the image, a gray sky flecked with branches, is so blurred that it becomes kinetic, spinning as if it could give us a touch of vertigo if we look for too long.

In her pyramid photos, Verburg uses an ambiguous perspective to similar effects. Photographed from an aerial vantage point, it’s impossible to tell whether these sand structures are miniscule or enormous, monumental or in danger of disappearing entirely. Through Verburg’s manipulations, what we begin to see is the act of seeing itself, or perhaps the way our sight gets confounded and enhanced by invisible elements such as atmosphere, light, or point of view, Joann Verburg has written that her many photographs of olive trees are meant to make the viewer feel connected to them. However, she seems to be withholding something in that connection. If these photos invite us into a conversation, it’s not one we’d have with a lover or a dear friend. Not that the substance of our talk would be idle or insubstantial; instead, it’s rather like suddenly stumbling on a very serious discussion with someone you hardly know. It’s intimate, but not personal.

And yet, these photographs don’t leave me completely cold. There is something unexpected, and suggestive, about such reticence. The images, while they frustrate available associations, simultaneously make room for their own.

There's also a nice looking MoMA book Present Tense to go with the show. Alec Soth also has a useful little piece on her.

POSTSCRIPT: I just noticed 5B4 has a very good review of Present Tense