© Anne Arden McDonald, Untitled Self Portrait #55, 1994, 16 x 20” silver gelatin photograph

Artist/educator Bryan Whitney is this week’s guest editor on LENSCRATCH. Over the next four days, he introduces the work of four of his past students at the International Center of Photography whose practices revolve around spirituality, inner-life, and the natural world.

Concerning the Spiritual in Photography is a course I have taught for many years at the International Center of Photography. The class explores spirituality within the creative process and considers how we can consciously cultivate it in our work. Leading this class with such a dynamic group of photographers has been profoundly rewarding, and I am delighted that Lenscratch is featuring several of these talented artists.

Each of these artists, working with the medium of light and shadow, has created deeply personal and distinctly spiritual work. Juliette M. Ludeker’s painterly, storm-tossed underwater worlds are awe-inspiring scenes, captured in a humble backyard stream. Olga Fried’s large-format paper negative images evoke an otherworldly terrain, their barren beauty illuminated by vast, star-filled skies. Anne Arden McDonald’s abstract scrolls are masterworks of alchemical symbolism and chemical process, where the elements themselves become image- makers. Jonathan Silbert’s sly, haunting abstractions both surprise and unsettle, challenging our perceptions of body and soul. — Bryan Whitney

 An interview with the artist follows.

© Anne Arden McDonald, Big Bang, 2016, 40 x 30” Cameraless silver gelatin photograph

Anne Arden McDonald is a Brooklyn-based visual artist who was born in London, England, and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. From age 15 to 30, she made photographic self-portraits by building installations in the landscape or in abandoned interiors and performing privately for her camera in these spaces. She published a book of this work in 2004. More recently, she has been making process- and science-inspired images that involve both photography and sculpture. Her work has been exhibited in contexts that range from self-portrait, staged, ritual, plastic camera, antique process, and experimental photography to sculptural installations as large as a room and as small as a pocket watch.

McDonald’s work has been exhibited widely: over the past 40 years, she has had more than 50 solo exhibitions in 10 countries (approximately 600 total shows in 20 countries) and has been published in over 215 places in 20 countries, including Aperture, European Photography, and Eyemazing magazines. Her work is held in the collections of six major museums, including the Houston MFA, the Denver Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. She was a Lapine Fellow at the Millay Colony and has been a resident at Saltonstall, Byrdcliffe, Oak Spring Garden, the Sharpe Foundation, and Schrattenberg in Austria. She taught for six years at Parsons School of Design in New York and has lectured on topics such as staged photography, self-portraiture, Czech and Slovak photography, alternative photography, and her own work.

Follow Anne Arden McDonald on Instagram: @anneardenmcdonald

© Anne Arden McDonald, Untitled Self Portrait #12, 1989, 20 x 16” silver gelatin photograph

Self-Portraits

From the time I was 15 until I was 30, I broke into abandoned buildings and made photographs of myself in the spaces. These private performances for my camera grew to include installations I would build in the spaces and costumes I made and wore.

The performances explored my relationship to the world around me and were part ritual, part dance, and part daydream—I have had many fantasies that I have not been able to achieve in life as I have known it—being able to fly is the main one—and have been frustrated by the limitations of an earthbound body. This is a dilemma we share—being both flesh and spirit—living in a body with a mind that dreams.

My images serve as visual metaphors for struggles we face every day: tensions and balances, keeping hope alive against obstacles, and living in a vulnerable way without being crushed.

© Anne Arden McDonald, Untitled Self Portrait #3, 1987, 5 x 20” silver gelatin photograph

How does your work reflect themes of spirituality and inner life?

I began my life in photography at age 15 with a series of self-portraits. I was going to a born again Christian high school in Atlanta, Georgia, and was struggling to relate to those around me. I was photographing myself in abandoned buildings, I saw these spaces as a metaphor for me; I felt left behind and forgotten. These private performances for my camera explored my relationship to the world around me and were part ritual, part dance and part daydream. I had many fantasies, being able to fly was the main one, and felt frustrated by the limitations of an earthbound body. This is a dilemma we share–being both flesh and spirit–living in a body with a mind that dreams. My images serve as visual metaphors for struggles we face every day: tensions and balances, keeping hope alive against the obstacles, and living in a vulnerable way without being crushed. I continued making these narrative self portrait images until I was 30.

© Anne Arden McDonald, Untitled Self Portrait #55, 1994, 16 x 20” silver gelatin photograph

© Anne Arden McDonald, Untitled Self Portrait #38, 1992, 16 x 20” silver gelatin photograph

For the last 20 years I’ve been engaged in cameraless photography, I’ve been exploring ways of generating images on photographic paper without using a camera or a negative. The imagery emerges as circles and spheres, representing planets and atoms,  visualizing the macrocosm and the microcosm of life as we know it. These circles and loops are so much of what I see and experience. When I stand in the landscape, the horizon around me is a circle; when nature goes through four seasons and Spring comes again, that is a circle. Day begins again, circles are a constant experience, either spatially or temporally. With this more abstract work, I am exploring the deeper story, the older story, the story of all of us—it is also an expression of my search for a sense of wholeness.

© Anne Arden McDonald, Primordial Ooze, 2019, 20 x 16” Cameraless silver gelatin photograph

© Anne Arden McDonald, Primordial Ooze, 2019, 20 x 16” Cameraless silver gelatin photograph

In your practice, are there any rituals, photographic or otherwise, that guide your photography?

In the years when I was making the self-portraits, photographing myself was the ritual. I would also spend time in the space before photographing there; cleaning the space of debris, building an installation, and checking a compass to see if there might be a better time of day for light to come through a window or a door. It became important to me to spend time in the space before photographing there–opening to the mood of the place, and letting it have an impact on me, before jumping in to make images. It had something to do with letting go of the egocentrism that I would bring with me to the shoot.

Rituals in my work these days take many forms. I keep elaborate notes of what I do on photo paper, including listing every variable that I can identify, and mistakes that might engender other directions that I would like to try. Sometimes I sing to photo paper, sometimes I ask my ancestors, especially my father, to intercede on my behalf while working. I have also sprinkled medicines that he left behind when he died into some of my chemical paintings, as well as the iron-rich dirt from the cemetery in Chattanooga where he is buried.

I often spend the first 5 or 10 minutes upon waking, trying to imagine beautiful things that don’t exist in the world yet that I would like to create, or problem solving a place in an image where I have gotten stuck. I see that space in the early morning as the space between my conscious self and my subconscious self, so I try to access whatever richness might be present there.

© Anne Arden McDonald, Virus, 2019, 24 x 20” Cameraless silver gelatin photograph

© Anne Arden McDonald, Primordial Ooze, 2019, 20 x 16” Cameraless silver gelatin photograph

Have there been any mentors, thinkers or artists whose works have influenced your own photography or spirituality?

I am mostly self taught, but I have found inspiration in many places. Amongst them, Butoh Dance. In art, Lee Bontecou Joseph Cornell, Louise Bourgeois, Francis Bacon, Ross Bleckner, Terry Winters, JMW Turner, Cy Twombly, Anselm Kiefer, Bill Stockman, James Turrell, Alberto Burri, Ann Hamilton, William Kentridge, Hilma af Klint and recently Agnes Pelton. In Photography: Barbara Shinn, Joel Peter Witkin, Gerald Slota, Pavel Pecha, Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, Caleb Charlan, Chuck Kelton, Francesca Woodman, Dan Estabrook, Adam Fuss Andrei Tarkovsky, Jan Svankmajer, The Brothers Quay… Images from microscopes, telescopes, petri dishes. Nature, my spiritual mother. In music; REM, The Church, Laurie Anderson, Rasputina, David Bowie, Prince, The Cure, Iva Bittova, Krishna Das. Writers: Jeanette Winterson, Milan Kundera, Rebecca Solnit, Isadora Duncan, her book called My Life, Rumi, Edna St. Vincent Millay.

© Anne Arden McDonald, Primordial Ooze, 2019, 20 x 16” Cameraless silver gelatin photograph

© Anne Arden McDonald, Primordial Ooze, 2019, 20 x 16” Cameraless silver gelatin photograph

How did taking the class: “Concerning the Spiritual in Photography” at ICP influence your work and/or was there an assignment that particularly inspired you?

I loved the community of being in a class together and approaching assignments and seeing what happens. I enjoyed Bryan and the students, my favorite assignment was the one where myself and another student went back-and-forth, sending each other images and having a dialogue that was entirely visual, that was fascinating. I never went to art school and I always wondered what that would’ve been like.

© Anne Arden McDonald, Horizon Melts, 2025, 24 x 20” Cameraless silver gelatin photograph

What are you currently working on, and what’s in store for you?

At the moment, I’m part of a cameraless photography exhibition at an Art hotel in Milwaukee, and I just opened a solo show at UMass Dartmouth. 

I’ve been making experiments with pouring boiling hot liquids on chemigrams. This year I’m going to a residency program in Virginia for June and I am supposed to teach at the Maine Media Center in August. I had just made some breakthroughs on a new lumen process in September, just as the sun was beginning to get weaker and I was not able to continue, so I’m looking forward to the stronger sun coming back.

© Anne Arden McDonald, Big Bang, 2016, 40 x 30” Cameraless silver gelatin photograph

Bryan Whitney is a photographer and artist in New York City whose work involves experimental imaging techniques including x-rays, lensless imaging and alternative processes such as cyanotype. Whitney holds an MFA in Photography from the Tyler School of Art and a BA in the Psychology of Art from University of Michigan. He has taught photography at Rutgers University and currently teaches at the International Center of Photography in New York City and the New York Botanical Garden. A recipient of a Fulbright Grant for lectures on American Photography he has exhibited across the United States and internationally. His work has appeared in magazines such as Harpers Bazaar, Fortune, the New York Times, as well as being featured in books, posters and billboards. His X-ray botanical images have recently been acquired as a stamp designs by the US Postal Service.

Follow Bryan Whitney on Instagram: @bryanwhitney.art