`Visionary Landscapes: Ann Matlock and Corinne Dune'
When: Through Feb. 24 (Artists talk: 1 p.m. Saturday)
Where: D. Berman Gallery, 1701 Guadalupe St.
Info: 477-8877
On first encounter, one is tempted to guess that Corinne Dune's
contemplative photographs are either historical artifacts or fine-art prints
created by some low-tech process. After all, in this digital age, her faint, delicate images on carefully chosen paper employ none of the
bombastic potential of contemporary, high-tech photography.
But no, the French-born, Austin-based Dune, who spent several years living in Mexico with her novelist husband Christopher Cook, has
gone back in time to rescue the earliest techniques in her field. ``The first images obtained by inventors of photographic processes in the 19th century have always fascinated me,'' said the subdued
Dune in her unassuming North Central Austin home. ``I find in them something naively
receptive to the unknown."
To Dune, early photographs tell us about our current habits of looking.
``Charged with spontaneous mystery, they reveal within the mundane what otherwise would have remained hidden -- obscured by those habits which restrict our perception of the world, so that we see only what we expect to see,'' she said.
Seeing the world, and especially the arid portions of North America, with something like pre-photographic eyes sets Dune's optical experiences apart from those of most Sunday snappers. ``My landscape pictures were slowly recorded with a homemade pinhole camera obscura, with only the minimum elements required to make a
silent record: a tin box, a pinhole, a film and three to five minutes of sunlight exposure,'' she said. ``The pinhole camera allows one to take pictures
in another time, a lot `slower' time than we are accustomed in seeing things."
A craftsman as well as an artist, Dune relishes the details of old-fashioned
photography. ``The handmade aspect of my work is so important,'' she said, ``whether I make my own camera, my own negatives on paper or my own emulsion on the final print, it acts upon the image. The variations in the chemical amounts, the way the emulsion is laid on the paper, along with the unforeseen imperfections, can reveal a very different image than the one in the original negative. ``There is a very appealing aspect of discovery in working by hand." Dune believes she is getting a true,
uncorrected image that way. ``Perhaps I take an unconventional direction when I favor the roughest pinhole camera devices or the slowest
techniques to make a picture, but I like to view the whole image with distortion at the edges and the movement revealed in
long exposures,'' she said.
Dune carries her heedfulness into the final stages of creating prints.
``I appreciate the skill of handwork required to make good prints,'' she said. ``I try to experience the most basic photographic image, the most simple image preceding those modified by modern technical improvements which make the image conform to conventional social and
economic needs and expectations, which restrict it to a predictable vision."
Still, Dune is no purist. She is not above introducing nonhistorical
materials.
``During the past six years I have been experimenting with pigment
processes, making gum dichromates and carbon prints,'' she said. ``While
these processes are rooted in the 19th century, I enjoy using
contemporary painting materials, carefully choosing the highest quality and most permanent papers and pigment. Even at that, I still permit the sunlight and photographic device to make the image."
One reason Dune's visions of canyons, ruins and isolated plants hold the eye is the unspoken cultural context. ``I had read somewhere about one difference between art in America and art in Europe -- that American artists deal with space while European artists deal with history,'' she said. ``It is an apt observation in relation to my landscapes of America, for they do talk of time and history. Like if my mind was not shaped wide enough to apprehend the New World's large territory
without referring to history."
