Judy Fiskin: California 1974 - 1990
Online Viewing Room | March 3 – April 23, 2022
Judy Fiskin: California 1974 - 1990
Judy Fiskin photographing her Desert series, 1970s
For me, looking at small images somehow re-creates the experience of looking through a viewfinder. When you are looking through a viewfinder of a 35 mm camera, the scale disappears; you don’t know the size of the object you are looking at. It’s like receiving an image directly into your brain. And when you have to get up to the photograph to peer into it, you lose the sense of separation between yourself as a body and that picture as a separate entity.
At this size they’re edible. You don’t just scan them. You take them in all at once. The small scale organizes the image visually in a really graphic way. It gives it an immediate impact. Then if you want to look for detail, you can.
– Judy Fiskin in a 1988 interview by John Divola
A view of the works framed, as designed by the artist.
Framed dimensions: 7.5 x 9.5 inches
Judy Fiskin, Untitled, from the series Stucco, 1973-76
Gelatin silver print, 5 x 7 inches (12.7 x 17.8 cm)
$ 7,500.00
Judy Fiskin, Untitled, from the series Stucco, 1973-76
Gelatin silver print, 5 x 7 inches (12.7 x 17.8 cm)
$ 7,500.00
Judy Fiskin, Untitled, from the series Stucco, 1973-76
Gelatin silver print, 5 x 7 inches (12.7 x 17.8 cm)
$ 7,500.00
Judy Fiskin, Untitled, from the series Stucco, 1973-76/2006
Gelatin silver print, 5 x 7 inches (12.7 x 17.8 cm)
$ 7,500.00
Judy Fiskin, Untitled, from the series Stucco, 1973-76
Gelatin silver print, 5 x 7 inches (12.7 x 17.8 cm)
$ 7,500.00
Judy Fiskin, Untitled, from the series Stucco, 1973-76
Gelatin silver print, 5 x 7 inches (12.7 x 17.8 cm)
$ 7,500.00
Judy Fiskin, Untitled, from the series Military Architecture, 1975
Gelatin silver print, 5 x 7 inches (12.7 x 17.8 cm)
$ 7,500.00
Judy Fiskin, Untitled, from the series Military Architecture, 1975
Gelatin silver print, 5 x 7 inches (12.7 x 17.8 cm)
$ 7,500.00
Judy Fiskin, Untitled, from the series Desert, 1976
Gelatin silver print, 7 x 5 inches (17.8 x 12.7 cm)
$ 7,500.00
Judy Fiskin, Untitled, from the series Desert, 1976
Gelatin silver print, 7 x 5 inches (17.8 x 12.7 cm)
$ 7,500.00
Judy Fiskin, Untitled, from the series Long Beach, 1980/2006
Gelatin silver print, 8 x 6 inches (20.3 x 15.2 cm)
$ 7,500.00
Judy Fiskin, Untitled, from the series Long Beach, 1980
Gelatin silver print, 8 x 6 inches (20.3 x 15.2 cm)
$ 7,500.00
Judy Fiskin, Untitled, from the series 35 Views of San Bernadino, 1974
Gelatin silver print, 5 x 7 inches (12.7 x 17.8 cm)
$ 7,500.00
Judy Fiskin, Untitled, from the series 35 Views of San Bernadino, 1974
Gelatin silver print, 5 x 7 inches (12.7 x 17.8 cm)
$ 7,500.00
Judy Fiskin, Untitled, from the series 35 Views of San Bernadino, 1974
Gelatin silver print, 5 x 7 inches (12.7 x 17.8 cm)
$ 7,500.00
Judy Fiskin, Untitled, from the series Stucco, 1973-76
Gelatin silver print, 5 x 7 inches (12.7 x 17.8 cm)
SOLD
Judy Fiskin, Untitled, from the series Stucco, 1973-76
Gelatin silver print, 5 x 7 inches (12.7 x 17.8 cm)
$ 7,500.00
Judy Fiskin, Untitled, from the series Stucco, 1973-76
Gelatin silver print, 5 x 7 inches (12.7 x 17.8 cm)
SOLD
Judy Fiskin
Once characterized as a Los Angeles variant on a German photographic tradition that now stretches from August Sander to Andreas Gursky, the work Judy Fiskin made between the ’70s and the mid-’90s is a body of sleekly reductive typologies of different West Coast vernaculars. Always working serially, she has tried her hand at all genres, from landscapes (“Desert Photographs,” 1976) to architectural exteriors (“Dingbat,” 1982–83) to interiors and still lifes (“Some Aesthetic Decisions,” 1984, and “Some Art,” 1989–91). The strict regularity, sharply graphic “look,” diminutive scale, and tabletlike framing lend a sense of overarching coherence to Fiskin’s restless eye.
– Jan Tumlir, Artforum, 2004
Until she stopped taking pictures in 1995, at the start of the digital age, Judy Fiskin was what might be called a photographer's photographer. Like the paintings of Giorgio Morandi and Albert York, her crisp black-and-white images were small – not much larger than negatives – and limited in subject matter.
Focusing primarily on domestic architecture, especially in Southern California, they both reduce photography to its documentary and graphic essence and convey a kind of exquisite purity. They also wittily yet tenderly isolate pedestrian structures as the cultural artifacts and often odd, sculptural entities that they were.
––Roberta Smith, The New York Times, 2012