Amanda Means

Amanda Means was raised in a small upstate New York farming community. She moved to New York City over thirty-five years ago. Her artwork reflects a sense of nature in this crowded, urban environment. Initially, Means photographed tangles of underbrush in the countryside and printed the results in her lower Manhattan darkroom. The tangles represented the chaotic environment that surrounded her. Later on she photographed leaves and flowers without a camera. Now Means continues to explore the duality of natural and human built environments by photographing light bulbs and water glasses. She explores how the mysterious presence of natural forces can be found even in these small, mass-produced objects. She recently moved from Manhattan to Beacon, NY.

Water Glasses

The process of making photographs is full of mind twists: upside-downs, downside ups, negatives/positives, blacks/whites…The camera sees with a lens that projects an upside-down image on the ground glass of a view camera.  The photographer composes by looking at this upside-down image and inverting to right side up in her mind.  A negative is used to make a positive.  What is black in the negative becomes white in the positive print.  Berenice Abbott played with these concepts in designing her Projection-Supersite camera.  This invention functioned like a reverse camera obscura.  She placed the lights and the subject inside the camera and projected them outward through the lens onto film tacked to the wall of a darkened room.

I make my water glass photographs in a way very similar to the way Berenice Abbott worked.  The difference is that instead of projecting onto film as she did, I project onto photographic paper. My instrument is a sizeable horizontal enlarger whose lens is pointed toward the adjacent wall, onto which is tacked a large sheet of photographic paper.  With wood and a black cloth reminiscent of the shroud needed to focus a view-camera in bright light, I have constructed a large chamber, lined with white paper, between the powerful lamp and the lens.  Into that chamber I place an actual water glass.

The resulting images are tonally negative – what is light in the subject is dark in the print. Since the exposure is made by light passing through the back and front of the water glass and through the water, all of the activity on both the outside and the inside of the glass is visible.  In most traditional photography the image is made by light reflecting off the surface of an object.  I alter this traditional equation by working with the light that passes through these objects.  This gives a view of all of the rich textures, shapes and lines — scratches, chips, bubbles, and condensation — in each glass.  It is endlessly fascinating to me how this very simple and direct approach produces images full of such mystery and complexity.

When the water glasses are closely cropped and considerably enlarged, the viewer’s sense of scale is thrown out of kilter.  A remarkable transformation occurs.  These common, everyday glasses, tossed into the dishwasher, scrubbed and scratched and chipped with use, become something very unique. Each one takes on its own personality. It might become a rich landscape of light and texture resembling the surface of a distant planet.  Tiny air bubbles resemble a far away constellation in the dark night sky.  Scratches appear to be charcoal markings you might see in a Cy Twombly painting.  The close cropping has the effect of pushing the water glass image out of the front surface of the paper, almost as if it is protruding into the room with the viewer.  This adds to the sense of immediacy.

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