ARTISTS STATEMENT
David Nester
The photographs in this exhibition were made using a lens from a “Diana” camera, a camera made in Hong Kong during the 1960’s and early 1970’s. The cameras were sold in Dime stores back then for a couple of dollars. I still find it to be particularly amusing that the film the camera uses cost more than the camera itself. I have heard that working vintage Dianas sell now on eBay for between $100 to $150.
I began using the Dianas in 1975 after seeing the compelling photographs of Nancy Rexroth in an Aperture magazine entitled ‘The Snapshot’. In 1979, my work was included in the traveling group exhibition and book entitled “The Diana Show,” compiled by The Friends of Photography in California, which featured images by 43 photographers using the Diana. I photographed with the original Dianas until the mid-1980s until my cameras became inoperative due to mechanical failure.
In the early 1990’s I began adapting the lenses from my broken cameras for use on 4x5 and 8x10 view cameras. The 4x5 camera images were the basis for my work in the 1994 Memphis Brooks Museum of Art Biennial: Contemporary Memphis Photography. The 8x10 camera work resulted in a series of platinum/palladium prints that were exhibited by Ledbetter-Lusk Gallery in Memphis in 1997. In 1998 I adapted a more portable twin-lens reflex camera to use Diana lenses for a series of photographs. In both of these bodies of work, magnolia blossoms from my backyard were the primary subjects. With these images, my intent was to address visual matters and sensibilities beyond the kitschiness so often associated with this ‘southern’ icon. The pictures currently on exhibit at the Arts Festival Invitational show at the Botanic Gardens are the product of the adapted twin-lens camera fitted with Diana lenses. The images, while sharing much of the same intent as the magnolia series, use the female figure as subject. They represent a continuing interest in coupling the primitive rendering capabilities of the Diana lens with a subject rich in possibilities for interpretation and abstraction.
The prints are being made with an Epson 2000P printer using archival inks and paper from high- resolution scans. This exhibition represents the early stages of my use of digital tools in the printing of my photographs.
This month I am also showing a selection of large (32”x40”) sumi ink drawings at Carnavale Memphis on South Main Street across from Central Station. They are part of a rather large group of works made between 1988 and 1995, which for the most part have never been out of the studio. These works are non-objective and were created in an instinctive manner with concern for the quality of the marks made by a brush loaded with the distinctively “black-black” sumi ink. I feel that in drawing, unlike in photography, immediacy is a prevailing factor in the creation of the image: impulse, feeling, action and resolution happen in the same time and space.
October, 2001
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