TACTILE | MERCANTILE SCENE ONE
LAYERS AND JUXTAPOSITIONS, COOL, COLLECTED, comic and cagey. Ralph Koltai, set designer for the Royal Shakespeare Company, sits back in repose on a shag carpet with three companions, a cardboard cutout cheetah, a little lioness hand-puppet, and a famously photographed sex kitten.
Keith Simpson, preeminent forensic scientist, seen three times (Mick Jagger being the only other subject, or Queen’s subject, to appear more frequently in TACTILE|MERCANTILE); Simpson in the pose that originally appeared on the cover of the Telegraph Sunday Magazine and was later acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, London, with some of the accouterments of his trade: a chemistry bottle, a large hand-blade, and a skull under glass. Next, in his drawing-room attended to by a woman in a coral coloured coat; and at play in the yard riding a child’s bicycle with a granddaughter in chase.
Following a long day photographing Dr. Simpson at work, taking less palatable images that did not make the cut for this exhibit, Aronson was asked to attend another autopsy, that of The Who’s drummer Keith Moon, which she declined. The Telegraph Sunday Magazine included a shot of Simpson at home carving a roast.
Relaxed time for Robert Stephens, also photographed for the Telegraph Sunday Magazine, resulted in his more than ordinary drunkenness; Aronson had to inform the Royal Shakespeare Company that he was not likely to make the evening’s performance. And he didn’t. It might well be the morning-after that he was photographed somewhat red-faced against a red painted brick wall looking like a street tough save for the pink Oxford (this likeness is also in the National Portrait Gallery).
Cambridge man, and Renaissance man, Jonathan Miller, who emerged from “Beyond the Fringe” (the satire that he, with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett, brought to the London stage, while Miller was still a trainee neurologist). Satirist, scientist, opera director, associate director (appointed by Laurence Olivier) at the National Theatre, and BBC Television producer, Miller is seen in front of his scheduling board which includes such program titles as MIND+MATTER, HUMAN HOSP, and FOUNTAINS ITALY. Miller once explained his refusal to work with Italian tenor, Luciano Pavarotti, “There’s no point in trying to build a production around someone who’s so massively inert.” Although it serves as seated portrait for the sedate National Portrait Gallery, it is easy to see from this photograph why Jonathan Miller has no regard for inertia; see it in his eyes, which in the grouping of PERSONS LIVING|PERSONS STONE seem to look askance at the massive (eight and a half feet high) bust of Constantine I from the Museo del Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome, sporting a similar upturned expression.
Stone faces and live faces arranged for coincidence and comedy — a bust of Caracalla from the Hall of Emperors, Palazzo Nuovo, Museo Capitolino in Rome, a conserved head, hung beside the portrait of Keith Simpson holding the preserved skull; and then copyist-artist John McKay leaning over his seated unimpressed mother with his imitations of master-works lining the room, exhibited alongside a photograph of a photographer capturing another work of art, Constantine once more, this time a colossal bronze in the Appartamento dei Conservatori, Hall of the Horatii and Curiatii, Museo Capitolino; J. Antony Redmile photographed in his London shop seated on a bronze dodo bird, a species tragically extinct, vies with busts photographed in the Hall of Frescoes, Appartamento dei Conservatori, for grandiosity; and outside the museum a bridegroom stands aside for his bride while she is caught in the Piazza del Campidoglio.
ATTENDING THE STONES' SHOW AT EARL'S COURT during their 1976 tour with the Meters, while not on assignment, Aronson brought a camera along, held it high above her head, upside down, and without the view finder, hoped for some memento photos; what she got was an exquisite series of unusual scope and vantage, the performers on stage lit in cut-out, with only a bit of neon EXIT sign on the black backdrop and the audience in silhouette.
COLLECTED AT THE MOUNT AUBURN CEMETERY in Cambridge, Massachusetts where Charles Bulfinch, Winslow Homer, Edward Land, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Margaret Fuller are buried, arranged in still life upon a black cloth, and captured, with some life still evident, in full outline and at closer range as a terrain of spines and veins.
ONE FISH, two fish, yellow fish, dead fish.
PHOTOGRAPHED FOR A SERIES in the Telegraph Sunday Magazine on London shops and their proprietors: Kenneth Wye and son, Eaton's Shell Shop; Philip Pool displaying William Mitchell nibs and an oversized pen; H. D. Hunger, photographed before the glass and behind the glass, exhibiting his wares to window shoppers, Sac Frères amber shop; J. Antony Redmile again, with his menagerie of the luxurious and ludicrous; and more recent scenes in neon and gilt from Galeries Lafayette, Paris.
A GREEK FISHERMAN MENDS A NET IN PAROS, almost misplaced before an Orthodox church, on the edge of a straw covered seat; overgrowth on a fence-post in Cambridge, Massachusetts; image of a dung roof home near Khajuraho, India; and a paper parasol, in Kyoto.
FROM THE FOOTHILLS OF THE HIMALAYAS and the further land of the Kali Gandaki Valley, Nepal; a wooden prow on Dahl Lake, Srinagar, Kashmir; sunset on Singapore Harbor; to red on white in a snow squall in York, Maine; and a painted arrow on a rain-soaked roadway in Bath, England.
JUDITH ARONSON lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts where her graphic design and photography studio is based. She teaches graphic design at Simmons College while continuing to photograph in both colour and black and white.
She studied photography while a graduate student in design at Yale University and while assisting the photographer Hans Hoefer, the founder and publisher of the "InSight Travel Guide" books. After returning from three years traveling and working in Southeast Asia in the early 1970s, she began selling her photographs and taking commissions including those for Ms. Magazine, The New York Times and various publishing houses. Later she moved to England where she photographed for the Telegraph Sunday Magazine. During the 1980s and 1990s she focused on her black and white portraits of authors and artists culminating in four one-person exhibitions entitled "Faces" (1998 and 1999) both in London and around Boston. These shows featured the artists - among them the Nobel laureates Saul Bellow, Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott plus others in the arts such as Sarah Caldwell and Frederick Wiseman - often with another person or persons, alongside evocations of the human face by the subjects themselves, excerpted as designed typographic panels. Many of these photographs appeared in The Threepenny Review, in 2003, and the series has become the basis for a book forthcoming in 2007-8. Since 2000 she has been experimenting with digital printing of both her colour and black and white work.
Judith Aronson has a B.A. in American Studies from the University of Michigan, an M.A. in City Planning and an M.A. in Graphic Design from Yale University. As a professor of design she has taught at Massachusetts College of Art and at the New England School of Art and Design; and, in both graphic design and photography, at Boston University and Cambridgeshire College of Art, England. She is now a professor of communications at Simmons College, where she holds a full-time graphic design position.
Judith Aronson Design works for clients in print, publishing and education including Houghton Mifflin, Ligature, Inc., and D.C. Heath. Prior to starting her own company she worked for one year at Oxford University Press and art-directed the "Where's Boston?" bicentennial book for Cambridge Seven Associates. In photography, besides the work mentioned above, her photographs have appeared at the Cambridge Poetry Festival, England and are held by the National Portrait Gallery, London. She has studied and taught the art of book-binding and letterpress.
TACTILE|MERCANTILE is Judith Aronson's first colour exhibition though she has been taking such pictures professionally for thirty-five years. This two-part show delves into her archives from travels in Asia and the Telegraph Sunday Magazine assignments, and it juxtaposes some of that work with her more recent travels and her interests in textures and digital photography.
The two part exhibition deputed at the Isole Gallery of Art + Industrial Design, Boston, Massachusetts, 2006.
Image preparation and exhibition prints by Youngsuk Suh with Judith Aronson.
Book design by Judith Aronson Design, Cambridge and Un-Gyve Limited, Boston.
Design and production assistance provided by Kristen Matta.
Text by L. A. Nemrow for Un-Gyve Limited, Boston.
TACTILE|MERCANTILE was made possible in part by a Fund for Research grant awarded to the photographer by Simmons College, Boston.
Each photograph is signed and appears in a limited edition of twenty five. Photographs are priced individually; please inquire about purchasing a group or any of the photographs in the alternate size. The catalogue is available for what is the cost of production $88.