You're staring at a large, 2-D image of a silvery ball suspended in velvet blackness. Nipple-like protrusions and snaky lines meander over its surface. Is it a piece of jewelry, some ornamented vessel created by a metalsmith, a particle illuminated by an electron microscope?
The title of this work won’t help: Darkness U. You’re pretty much on your own unless you ask its creator, Doris Mitsch. “It’s the skeleton of an actual sea urchin,” she says.
Welcome to the moody, mysterious world of Mitsch’s digital-scanner photography. It’s a place where organic forms such as flowers, shells and sea creatures can be seen for what they really are: universes unto themselves, with hills and canyons, wrinkles and folds, spirals and curves, even veins and flesh. “My images of flowers are probably pretty close to what insects would see—and aren’t insects the ‘audience’ that flowers are actually intended for?” Mitsch asks mischievously.
The artist photographs her subjects in an ingenious but simple way. She places them on an ordinary flatbed digital scanner (keeping the top open), draws the curtains in her cheerful, red-walled San Francisco studio, envelops herself in darkness and starts scanning away, carefully positioning and repositioning the items to capture them from unusual angles. “There’s a meditative pace to making these images that I really enjoy and that I think comes across in their viewing,” observes Mitsch, ’87.
After transferring the digital files to her computer, she tinkers with them slightly, using Photoshop software to elicit the kinds of shading effects that photographers ordinarily seek in the darkroom printing process. Mitsch burns a CD for each image and takes them to The LightRoom, a digital photo shop in Berkeley. There, owner Rob Reiter helps her print the images with archival inks on high-end paper. As the printer spits out the images, eight different ink jets pass over the paper, producing a rather soppy piece that requires careful drying with a portable heater. “This is to prevent the ink in the dark areas from bleeding too much into the lighter areas,” she says. “That’s one of the biggest challenges.”
The prints, ranging from 14 inches square to 40 by 32, are technically classified as photographs but appear as much more; they have the lush, almost three-dimensional quality of pastels. “That comes from the heavy, textured watercolor paper I use, which gives them an inky, matte surface that you can’t get with traditional photo paper,” Mitsch explains. Their almost spooky glow is a result of the scanner’s beam sweeping over the object in complete darkness, illuminating some areas brightly and trailing off mistily around the edges.
Mitsch’s work thus has the effect of not only recording nature but subtly improving upon it. She typically portrays a single subject as several different entities in a series by varying the scanning angles. Laying an Iceland poppy on its back, for example, produces an unusual dorsal view in which the flower’s petaled essence is clearly identifiable. But by scanning it topside down, Mitsch probes its delicate interior, creating an image that could be mistaken for sumptuous red satin. “I’m basically interested in exploring what beauty is, how it works and what makes shapes beautiful to the eye,” she says.
Mitsch has been exploring art since her childhood in Portola Valley, Calif. “My mother claims I could draw before I could talk,” she says with a self-effacing laugh. “I’d always wanted to be an artist, but I was dissuaded from declaring an art major by my worried parents, who’d immigrated to the United States from Germany after World War II and who urged me to pursue something more practical.”
At Stanford, Mitsch majored in English but took as many art classes as she could. “Joel Leivick was my first photography teacher—incredibly inspiring—and he’s the first one who taught me about alternative photography processes,” she says. Mitsch also served as the Daily’s graphics editor and did freelance graphic design around campus. That gave her enough experience to be hired upon graduation by Apple Computer. After rising to become an art director there, Mitsch moved on to creative director positions at a couple of agencies and in 1996 formed her own design firm, DCL. She continued to do oil painting and photography and take courses at the California College of Arts and Crafts in her spare time.
In 1998, Mitsch and her husband, Mark Barden, set aside their careers in design and communications for an open-ended journey to Europe and Asia that wound up lasting 10 months. “After about three months, my old life began to fade away,” she says. “I realized that I had allowed work for clients to take too much precedence over my own creative projects. When I came back, I decided to give my own work more time.”
Mitsch, who had been experimenting with various photographic processes for 10 years, began to create serious scanner art in the summer of 2000. Seeing the results, her Stanford friend Serena Wellen suggested that Mitsch contact the ClampArt gallery in New York, where Wellen, ’88, exhibited her own photography. In the spring of 2001, gallery owner Brian Clamp agreed to take some of Mitsch’s images on consignment, and it wasn’t long before they began to sell.
“Mitsch is at the forefront of a new way of making photographic images,” says Clamp. “She’s also pushing photography into a more painterly realm that’s reminiscent of Georgia O’Keeffe. Her work is not only beautiful but critically significant.” Clamp says he knows of 10 or 20 others across the country using the new medium, though none so well as Mitsch, in his view.
During the past 18 months, Mitsch, who now freelances for her bread and butter, has participated in more than 12 group shows, some featuring renowned photographers like Robert Mapplethorpe, Imogen Cunningham and Karl Blossfeldt. Her work sells well and has quickly earned her the mark of a bona fide artist; her first solo show, at ClampArt, runs from January 30 to March 29. She will also be represented at the 12th International Los Angeles Photographic Print Exposition January 16 through January 19 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.
“One of my fears about ‘coming out of the closet’ as an artist was that doing my artwork in a professional context might take the joy out of it, or make me think too much about whether my work would sell or not,” she says. “But I haven’t found that to be the case at all. I think it’s great that people are buying my photos and living with them in their homes. But I don’t think it would matter too much to me if they didn’t. I just love making them.”
Marguerite Rigoglioso is a freelance writer in Oakland.
