“Aftershocks” photo approach creates a dream-like experience with images of natural landscapes, river banks, human figures and newspapers. The post Between headlines and olive trees with JoAnn Verberg appeared first on MinnPost.
Across the globe, we take over a trillion photos per year. It’s no wonder, since so many of us carry around a phone camera in our pockets. We take pictures of our friends and family, special events, meals, flowers and our backyards. We take pictures of when terrible things happen and we capture our current mood. We take pictures of sexy things and disgusting things and beautiful things and we text them, post them on social media, email them, or just keep them for ourselves until we have too many photos and have to get rid of some.
It’s just a completely different world from the early days of photography, when a photograph was a rarity and the process of taking a photograph was a much more involved endeavor.
JoAnn Verberg slows things down a bit. For the still photographs in “Aftershocks,” on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, she used a large-format vintage camera with a bellows — one of those accordion-like contraptions — that she placed on a tripod, using a dark cloth to compose and focus each image. The bellows allowed for movement of the front of the camera — both rotating it or tilting it to adjust the focus.
Verberg told me over email that she looked at each picture upside down, working on one sheet of film at a time. As opposed to modern cameras, which have an exposure of about 1/125 of a second, Verberg’s photographs take between 1/10 of a second to a second.
The painstakingly slow process Verberg used to create each photo results in a slowing down for the viewer in a few different ways. For one thing, each photo has stark contrasts between blurriness and focus, created in part because of the camera’s long exposure time.
There’s a dreaminess in these wobbly photographs of olive trees, river banks, human figures and newspapers. Taken in natural landscapes adorned with luminous greenery and washed with pastel light, they have moments of pointed attention — in a leaf, a figure’s expression, a piece of bark — that draw the eye.
Sometimes her subjects are asleep, or lounging amid nature. In “GREEN JIM AT THE FONTI” (2023), Verberg’s husband, poet Jim Moore, lays in a bed of fluffy seeds. When they have their eyes open, like in “Gary/Garden” (2018) and “UNTITLED ELIAS” (2020), Verberg captures what seems to be trepidation in her subjects’ eyes.
I walked through the exhibition with Elizabeth Armstrong, who organized the show as a guest-curator. Armstrong spent many years in Minnesota, first as a curator at the Walker Art Center and later as contemporary art curator and director, and got to know Verberg during her time here.
Armstrong said the shifts in and out of focus remind her of how we experience nature. “If you’re standing in one place, you see things clearly, but then your peripheral vision is blurred,” she said. She even experiences a kind of vertigo at times with the work. “She takes you down into it,” Armstrong said.
The text in the newspapers themselves are often blurry, and yet integral to the meaning. In “NEWS FROM AFRICA,” (2023) Verberg photographed a man in a beautiful park in Italy at the headwaters of the Clitunno River, holding the international edition of the New York Times featuring a story about African migrants trying to get to Europe by boat.
As she captured the image, the newspaper was being moved by the wind. “I wanted the individual passengers to be readable, but it was impossible to control exactly how much the paper would shake,” she told me. In the end, she liked the result: the mood of the piece was enhanced by the slow shutter speed because it emphasized the uncertainty and treacherousness of the migrants’ journey. “The photo in the newspaper reads as though the boat itself is being blown,” she said. “It’s in jeopardy, and might capsize.”
There are a number of works in the show that feature newspapers. “THEY WILL HAVE TO ANSWER TO US” (2019) features the headline, “China aims to ease crisis in Myanmar.” Next to that headline is an image for another article of a man wearing a black cloth almost completely covering his face, and his bare, tattooed chest is exposed. I couldn’t read the headline for the second article in the photograph, but looked it up later: it’s about gangs in El Salvador, and the headline matches the title of the photograph.
“Blurring boundaries”
In Verberg’s newspaper works, she creates a contrast between the natural environment where her subject holds the newspaper and the violence depicted on the front page. “The blurring of boundaries between us and the newspaper itself and the people in the paper appeals to me because we are not hit over the head with guilt and culpability, but there’s an invitation to think about the fact that we people are all in the same world at the same moment,” Verberg said.
Besides still photographs, “Aftershocks” features videos made with a digital camera that are grouped together in diptych, triptych, and 6-screened configurations, where each video looks like one part of a larger image. To me they looked like French windows. I wanted to walk through them to enter into the world of the videos.
Armstrong told me there’s an illusion to the video works (as well as the photographs), because they were recorded at different times. “These aren’t truly what they appear to be,” she said. The videos are “beckoning the viewer to engage with the moments of soft and sharp focus.”
Verberg told me the work was the most complex project she’s ever taken on, because it has to do with the now. “The viewer brings time to the work in the show, and thus there’s a dialog and a sense of reciprocity between being, living, the present tense on one hand and on the other hand, the news and both the natural and the human-made versions of the world (culture) outside our bodies,” she said.
There’s plenty of seating in the gallery room, and there’s a long table with chairs, books and a copy of the New York Times refreshed each day. Armstrong told me the idea was to allow people to spend time with the work, not simply walk through it quickly.
After we parted, Armstrong texted me that the word that came to mind for her about Verberg’s work and the installation was “sanctuary,” and I agree that fits with both the work and the setup of the show, particularly as we begin the new year.
It is a sanctuary for those of us far away from the headlines, though not those who the headlines are about. There’s a distance — physically and in time — between the stories in the newspaper, the people shown reading the news, and those of us looking at the images now, in the relative safety of a gallery space. And the amount of sanctuary a person feels will depend on their own identity, experience, and the circumstances in their lives.
Verberg began working on “Aftershocks” in 2016, after a 6.2-magnitude earthquake killed 299 people in Central Italy. Born in the suburbs of New York, Verberg spends part of her time in Minnesota and part of her time in Umbria. Her photographic series ruminates on not just the impact of the initial quake, but the unsettling aftershocks that rocked the area for months afterward.
“Aftershocks” and Trump
When I think of the year 2016, the main news event that I recall from that year was the presidential election.
I wondered as I walked through the exhibition if the “Aftershocks” series could be a metaphor for Trump winning the 2016 election, and later the policies he put in place the next four years. When I asked Verberg about this in our email exchange, she told me she didn’t include any newspapers that featured stories about Trump because she didn’t want to give him any more air time than he already has. She had done some work responding to Trump when he was running in 2016, but “it was too obvious and specific,” she said.
Overall, she sees this body of work as a way of finding balance in times of trouble— whether that’s political divisiveness, environmental disaster, war, fear or illness. “If I were the boss of the world, I’d say you must pay attention to both beauty and suffering,” she said.
Ultimately, Verberg is creating a space for holding onto to the daily misfortunes of the world and finding, as she quotes from poet Jack Dale, “the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless/ furnace of this world.”
“JoAnn Verburg: Aftershocks” runs through Jan. 12 in the Harrison Photography Gallery (3rd Floor) at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (free). More information here.
While you’re there, pop over to the Minnesota Artist Exhibition Program Gallery, where “Roshan Ganu: रातराणी: The Night Blooming Jasmine” is on view. Blending Hindu Myth, memory and personal narrative, Ganu layers video, painting, and sculpture in a lush landscape. As I’ve discussed previously, Roshan has a wonderful talent for blending darkness and light, and her latest exhibition is immersive, theatrical, and just a bit frightening. On view through Feb. 23 at Mia. More information here.
Sheila Regan