Victor Landweber

Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to present an online exhibition of Victor Landweber’s celebrated series, American Cameras. Each camera’s individuality and beauty are emphasized using a halo isolated against a black background, allowing each camera’s form, color, and design to create an engaging catalog of vintage camera types.

Landweber states, "I began to photograph cameras when I realized how ideal they would be as subjects for prints made on the second-generation Cibachrome that became available in the late 1970s. The new material had a deep glossy black and a metallic-looking highlight, perfect for a literal representation of a camera’s black leatherette and chrome trim. I had intended American Cameras as a Pop Art project, though entirely photographic in it subject and process. My intention was borne out when Ivan Karp, on e of the original master purveyors of Pop, exhibited the full set of 15 Cameras at O.K Harris Gallery, NYC, in 1988."

In his essay, American Cameras: Referencing  Art and Shifting Time, author and curator Mark Johnstone points out: "The fifteen photographs in the set are titled with the model names of the cameras, evoking sly references to movies, implications of social status and a variety of marketing hyperboles: Brownie Starlet, Hopalong Cassidy, Lady Carefree, Imperial Debonair, Duo Lens Imperial Reflex,  and Boy Scouts of America Official 3-way Camera. Underlying these photographs and their titles is a subtext about 1950s American manufacturing and dynamic marketing, nostalgic pleasure and, most significantly, photography itself. American Cameras underscores what Siegried Kracauer wrote when he said: 'the real subject of photography is photography.' Landweber’s cameras are a prime example of photography turned back upon itself, its tools and, by implication, its methods. In his gleaming 16×20 Cibachrome prints, the halos around the cameras make them look like holy relics."

In describing his technique, Landweber states: "I wanted to separate the cameras from the black background and came up with a technique for rimming them with light. I cut a black paper mask a little larger than the outline of the camera and positioned the camera and the mask together on a light box, such as one used for viewing slides. I made the mask by positioning a photographic enlarger at the same height as my camera lens and printing a photogram of the camera. I then sandwiched the photogram with a piece of black velour paper and cut out a slightly larger shape than the image of the camera. I placed the black paper mask and the camera together on the light box and gave two exposures: one for the camera which was front illuminated, and one for the light coming through the mask which let me stop down the lens and filter the color of the glowing outline for the best effect. As one indicator of how photography has been transformed by several decades of digital photography, it’s now so easy to produce an “outer glow” in Photoshop, that the possibility has become routine."

Victor Landweber (American, 1943 ) received a B.A. from the University of Iowa (1966) and a M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angels (1976).  His photographs have been exhibited in over forty solo exhibitions and featured in nearly one hundred group shows.  They have been reproduced in more than fifty catalogues and books on photography including: Victor Landweber Photographs, 1967-1984; Seismic Shift: Baltz, Deal and California Landscape Photography, 1944-1984; American Photography 1945 – Present, A Critical History; The Colletable Moment; and most recently Magnetic West, The Enduring Allure of the American West in Photography.   His work is included in numerous museum collections, including: Berkeley Art Museum, California Museum of Photography, Chrysler Museum, Hammer Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museet Moderna, Museum of Fine Art Houston, Princeton University Art Museum, Sheldon Art Museum, Norton Simon Museum of Art, among many others.