Beth Bischoff
By Edward Aiken
Curator - Author - Art Historian
Beth Bischoff's background is rooted in visual culture, fashion photography and international travel, especially in Europe and North Africa. She spent some of her student years in Paris where she studied at the Sorbonne and the École de Louvre. Her current work presents dramatic large-scale images where light, shadow and forms are revealed through a rich tonal palette of blacks, grays and whites.
Aspects of Bischoff's current vision are reminiscent of Giovanni Batista Piranesi's widely distributed late 18th Century prints of Roman ruins; late 19th Century photographs produced by travelers and archeolgists; and mid-19th century French landscape painting, especially the work of Gustave Courbet. Her large horizontal landscapes, in particular, have a quality about them that echoes what one of photography's founders, William Henry Fox Talbot, called, The Art of Fixing A Shadow (1839). However, whatever Bischoff may or may not owe to such visual traditions, her work is unmistakably her own.
The historical tradition that is most important to Bischoff is found in the late 19th and early 20th Century Pictoralst movement in photography, which drew upon the painting and printmaking traditions of James McNeill Whistler, the Aesthetic Movement and the Impressionists. The Pictorialist who interests Bischoff the most is Anne Brigman, whose images of nudes in nature, especially in the High Sierra, are quietly beautiful and notably audacious, especially for the time when they were created. Brigman was fearless. She seized the long Western tradition, controlled by male artists, of portraying female nudes in nature and made it her own. Bischoff takes Brigman's approach further by photographing the male nude in nature, while limiting the eroticism usually associated with such work. For Bischoff, quite literally, man and nature are not apart or in conflict, but elements brought together in an almost seamless continuum.
Bischoff's fascination with the dynamic seesaw between nature and humanity is further revealed in images of ancient Meso-American temples obscured by landscape, a broken-down stone wall or a pathway once heavily used but now almost abandoned. In such works she presents us with vantage points where we can see evidence of nature's persistence and hints of human stories we can never know. Bischoff is fascinated by the energy to be discovered in such scenes. She seeks to reveal that energy through the interplay of rich patterns of light and shadow using a soft-focus tonalist palette.