In today’s edition of #EssentialArt Studio Visits, Modernism Gallery presents Judy Dater’s Memoir, a portfolio begun in 2009 and completed in 2012, the realization of her decades-long interest in combining words and photographs to more fully tell her stories. The portfolio was accompanied by the animated video of the portfolio pages produced in collaboration with filmmaker Eli Noyes in which she reads the text with deadpan innocence that emphasizes the humor.
Video – Watch Memoir
Memoir animated video produced in collaboration with Eli Noyes.
From: “The Art of Judy Dater and Her Photographic Memoir,” by Donna Stein, Women’s Art Journal, Spring/Summer 2014:
Dater’s Memoir takes the form of scrapbook pages, for which she created a colorful trompe l’oeil effect using digitally collaged photographs, some old and some new, combined with sketches, newspaper clippings and other printed materials as well as snippets from the diaries she kept during her adult life. She captures interesting times photographically and sequences them into an anecdotal account that is intended for the future. Every print both summarizes and amplifies nearly five decades of her life and career as an innovative portrait photographer.
Dater compares the urgency to take stock at age forty, which led her to create theatrical personas in color and the extended series of black and white self-portraits in the western landscape, to her desire at age seventy to reflect back on her life in Memoir. Going through all the possessions in her parents’ home in order to sell it after their deaths, Dater unearthed boxes that turned out to be buried treasures. She uncovered long-forgotten photographs and souvenirs that helped her remember her past and visualize her story.
Memoir includes references to the past, present, and future. Biographical highlights intersect with transformational cultural changes (e.g., wars, politics and assassinations, feminism, abortion reform) to reveal how Dater has been shaped by the world. Beginning with 1941, her birth year, Memoir’s thirty-six pages cover a full century, which immediately alerts the viewer that the chronological scope of this artwork, at the very least, blends fact and fiction. As Dater is quick to acknowledge, “The work is not about truth. It’s about memory… it’s based on the truth and my desire to be entertaining.” Its appeal transcends gender, age, and race because the experiences she presents are universal as they encompass a lifetime.
Memoir recalls Dater’s journals, her dreams, and experiences of more than six decades, reimagining and reimaging her past. It is a powerful and amusing internal dialogue about age and womanhood. It is intensely personal, yet ironically feminist and universal. As Claire Sykes recently wrote, “All of Dater’s photographs are self-portraits.” Dater would agree:
“Portraits I’ve done in the past I’ve always thought were a reflection of me. With Memoir, now it’s just me looking at me, not at somebody else. The work certainly goes along with my other self-portraits. Like the black and white ones, it’s introspective and serious; and like the color, it’s also playful and satirical. And I think it also goes from the naïve to the knowing, to more of an acceptance of who I am and the reality of life in the moment.”
Women’s Movement from Memoir, 2012
For Dater, Memoir is about female experience. From the beginning of her career, she focused on women, and her work has a narrative, whether within one picture or a combination of images. She’s quick to say, “Everything I’ve done is Feminist”; though because of the freedom she expresses about sexuality and her sexual being, it is “post-feminist feminism.” While trying not to offend, she wants to wake people up, saying, “I’ve consciously tried to be provocative and disturbing.” As a result, Dater has been a part of the gestalt of her time, a product of her generation. The story of a free soul who never wanted to have anyone stick a label on her, the pages of Memoir document a life well lived.
Moroccan Moonlight from Memoir, 2012
Dear Mommy from Memoir, 2012
Memoir is a limited edition portfolio of 38 individual scrapbook pages, digitally printed on 17” x 22” Hahnemühle Fine Art Photo Rag Duo paper. Dater has also printed some of these pages as large-scale archival pigment prints (41” x 52”). In addition, she produced a 23-minute animated video of the portfolio pages in collaboration with filmmaker Eli Noyes in which she reads the text with deadpan innocence that emphasizes the humor.