Jessica Ferguson: Photo Objects
By Janelle Lynch
June 2012
Published by Loupe
Journal of the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University
Guest Editor: Janelle Lynch
Bones, stones, book boards, and texts—these are just some of the myriad objects that Jesseca Ferguson collects and uses to construct ephemeral tableaux, which she then photographs with a pinhole camera. To make her “photo objects,” as she refers to them, she takes the image of the assemblage and collages it with found text or diagrams onto antique book board covers, sometimes layering fabric and other relics. In Memling Columns, made with a cyanotype of the Northern Renaissance painter, Hans Memling, a dried flower adhered under the image reads as a tribute, giving the viewer a clue about Ferguson’s influences.
Ferguson also draws from her background in weaving, collage, and papermaking. She doesn’t have training in photography, but she does site David Hockney, Olivia Parker, and Rosamund Purcell’s photocollages, still lifes, and constructions as among her early inspirations. She took a pinhole photography workshop in the early 1980s because she wanted to make her own images rather than use found ones and she has been working with the camera, which she also makes, since then. Ferguson prints the negatives and then she integrates them with the other materials onto book boards. She has loved books since early childhood—reading them, coloring in them, experimenting with them by seeing how they would change if left outdoors—so it is logical that she incorporates them in her art practice and that her final pieces have weight and texture.
Walking through her studio, Ferguson intuitively chooses the objects for her construction, selecting items that resonate—that have significance alone or in dialogue with another object. Light plays an important role in her process, too. Ferguson considers the object’s physical characteristics and how light will reflect off of its surface.
Ferguson prints on hand-sensitized artist papers using the cyanotype process, the same chemistry from which blueprints are made. There is an inherent historical connection in her choice of this printing method, as it is what Anna Atkins used in 1888 to make the first photographically illustrated book, Photographs of British Algae. Ferguson also uses the ziatype, a variation of the platinum and palladium processes, as well as the argyrotype, adapted from the 1842 iron-silver argentotype process and related to the more commonly known sepia print.
There is a handmade quality to Ferguson’s photo objects that endows them with a deeply personal nature. The antique boards, book pages, and exposed binding invite a reading of the image. Each suggests an homage to a person or place—some lost, all loved—or a reference to an unfulfilled wish or perhaps a monument to an experience or a dream. They have an antiquated feeling, which is countered by the timelessness of such expressions.
In 2011, Ferguson’s photo objects were exhibited at the Fox Talbot Museum in the United Kingdom, which acquired Tome XXIV for their permanent collection. She enriches her studio practice by curating, teaching at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and participating in international art exchanges, most recently related to the pinhole camera in Poland. Ferguson’s current such project, Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, is in remembrance of the 2007 Baghdad car bombing in its historic area of booksellers and seeks to contribute to the rebuilding of what was lost that day.
Jesseca Ferguson’s photo objects combine her handmade pinhole photographs with found papers, antique book boards, and other materials. She uses a variety of large format pinhole cameras and films, sometimes with a 19th century lens, and makes contact prints on handmade papers.