"Melanie Willhide’s Tribute to a Burglar" | The New Yorker

By James Pomerantz

"When life give you lemons, make lemonade. When someone breaks into your home and steals your computer, make a collaborative photo project. That's what Melanie Willhide did.

Willhide dedicates "To Adrian Rodriguez, with Love" to the individual who broke into her home and stole various things. Her computer was recovered by the police, but the hard drive had been wiped clean. Willhide attempted to recover the erased data but found her digital photographs corrupted. Lemons! Rather than delete the images, Willhide considered these corrupted files a collaboration with her machine. She refined them and made additional ones inspired by the mess. Lemonade!

The series opens today at Von Lintel Gallery, in New York. Here’s a look."

Read more @ The New Yorker

MELANIE WILLHIDE | SELECTED WORKS

Melanie Willhide

Beefcake and Betsy, 2011

inkjet print

28 x 30 in (71.1 x 76.2 cm)

 

 Melanie Willhide   
Boys, Boys, Boys, 2001, 2011 
inkjet print 28 x 30 in (71.1 x 76.2 cm)

Melanie Willhide   

Dew Bug, 2011  

inkjet print 30 x 28 in (76.2 x 71.1 cm)

 

 Melanie Willhide  
I will show you mine, if you show me mine!, 2011  
inkjet print 30 x 28 in (76.2 x 71.1 cm)

 

 Melanie Willhide   
Kevin, 2009, 2011 
inkjet print 28 x 30 in (71.1 x 76.2 cm)

 

Melanie Willhide   

Larry's lips, 2011  

inkjet print 30 x 28 in (76.2 x 71.1 cm)

 

 Melanie Willhide   

Little Boy Blue, 2000, 2011  

inkjet print 30 x 28 in (76.2 x 71.1 cm)

 

 Melanie Willhide   

Marjorie in May, Haight/Ashbury, 2006, 2011  

inkjet print 30 x 28 in (76.2 x 71.1 cm)

 

Melanie Willhide  

Mike in Hula Hoop, 2010, 2011  

inkjet print 30 x 28 in (76.2 x 71.1 cm)

 

 Melanie Willhide   
Name Our Children, 2011   
inkjet print 30 x 28 in (76.2 x 71.1 cm)

 Melanie Willhide   
Nate, 2011  
inkjet print 30 x 28 in (76.2 x 71.1 cm)

 

 Melanie Willhide  

Swan Lake, 1986, 2011  

inkjet print 30 x 28 in (76.2 x 71.1 cm)

 

 Melanie Willhide  

T and V, Mesa Elks, 2008, 2011  

inkjet print 30 x 28 in (76.2 x 71.1 cm)

 

Melanie Willhide 
Untitled (the Jack Benny house), 2011   
inkjet print 28 x 30 in (71.1 x 76.2 cm)

 

MELANIE WILLHIDE | SELECTED PRESS

FOIL_IANN MAGAZINE

PHOTOWORLD2

MELANIE WILLHIDE: to Adrian Rodriguez, with Love | Opening reception: Thurs, Feb 23, 6—8 PM

 Melanie WillhideT and V, Mesa Elks, 2008, 2011inkjet print

Melanie Willhide

to Adrian Rodriguez, with Love

February 23 – March 24, 2012

Opening reception: Thursday, February 23, 6-8 PM

Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to present to Adrian Rodriguez, with love, an exhibition of new photographs by Melanie Willhide.

to Adrian Rodriguez, with love is dedicated to the stranger who burglarized the artist’s home in spring of 2010. Among the objects stolen was Willhide’s computer. Remarkably, police eventually recovered the computer, but upon its return Willhide learned the thief had erased its hard drive.  When the artist attempted to recover the lost data the image files she retrieved were corrupted. Rather than attempt to recreate what was lost, Willhide chose instead to work in partnership with her machine. Treating the pixels more like paint, she enhanced some of the retrieved distortions and also created new images inspired by the corrupted files.

Willhide’s images, which once read like straight photography, are now digitally sliced, mirrored and repeated in a playful demonstration of the medium’s capacity for the inauthentic. In Name Our Children two women's high heels remain firmly planted on the ground while their topless upper halves have been turned upside down and separated from their bodies, two stacks of breasts endlessly repeated. Beefcake and Betsy is made up of fragmented strips and blocks of color—acid pinks, greens and blues—interrupted by the disjointed image of a muscleman lifting a woman over his head. In to Adrian Rodriguez, with love Willhide explores new possibilities while highlighting the fragile limits of an increasingly digital medium.

Melanie Willhide has an MFA in Photography from Yale University and has exhibited throughout the United States for nearly two decades. Her work has been reviewed and featured in the New York Times, Blind Spot, the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times. This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition with Von Lintel Gallery and her third in New York. Willhide lives and works in Los Angeles.

MELANIE WILLHIDE | BIOGRAPHY

MELANIE
WILLHIDE                   

Born 1975, Manchester, Connecticut


SOLO EXHIBITIONS

TO ADRIAN RODRIGUEZ WITH LOVE
VON LINTEL GALLERY
New York, New York 2012

SLEEPING BEAUTIES (THE BOX UNDER THE BED)
YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY
New York, New York, 2011

TO ADRIAN RODRIGUEZ WITH LOVE
KAYCEE OLSEN GALLERY
Los Angeles, California, 2011

THE BELT OF VENUS
BELLWETHER GALLERY
New York, New York, 2007

SLEEPING BEAUTIES (THE BOX UNDER THE BED)
REAL ART WAYS
Hartford, Connecticut, 2007

THE AUGMENTED SIXTH
AOV GALLERY
San Francisco, California, 2000

Q.H.Q.D (EACH HOUR, EVERY DAY)
THE RED EYE GALLERY
Providence, Rhode Island, 1999


GROUP EXHIBITIONS

A About Bauhaus Ham Neu Tues
CARDWELL JIMMERSON
Los Angeles, California, 2010

MYSTERIUM
KINKEAD CONTEMPORARY
Los Angeles, California, 2009

SLEEPING BEAUTIES (THE BOX UNDER THE BED)
SF CAMERAWORK
San Francisco, California, 2008

DICE THROWN (WILL NEVER ANNUL CHANCE)
BELLWETHER GALLERY
New York, New York, 2006

CONTROL, EDIT, DELETE
KANSAS CITY SOCIETY OF CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY
Kansas City, Missouri, 2003

HOMEWORK
WALLSPACE GALLERY
New York, New York, 2002

CRUSH
THE BERNARD TOALE GALLERY
Boston, Massachusetts, 2002

YALE MFA THESIS SHOW
YALE SCHOOL OF ART GALLERY
New Haven, Connecticut, 2002

TWEAKED
ANGEL ORENSANZ FOUNDATION CENTER FOR THE ARTS
New York, New York, 2001

YALE PHOTGRAPHY MFA 2004
YALE SCHOOL OF ART GALLERY
New Haven, Connecticut, 2002

MIMIC
AOV GALLERY
San Francisco, California, 2001

UNTITLED: (CONJECTURE)
SF CAMERAWORK
San Francisco, California, 2000

YALE MFA 2002
YALE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF ART GALLERY
New Haven, Connecticut, 2000

Q.H.Q.D. (EACH HOUR, EVERY DAY)
AOV Gallery
San Francisco, California, 2000

THE RISD INVITATIONAL
WOODS GERRY GALLERY
Providence, Rhode Island, 1999

Q.H.Q.D. (EACH HOUR, EVERY DAY)
WOODS GERRY GALLERY
Providence, Rhode Island, 1999

MELANIE WILLHIDE: RECENT WORK
NEW SPACE GALLERY
Manchester, Connecticut,1996

MELANIE WILLHIDE: RECENT WORK
NEW SPACE GALLERY,
Manchester, Connecticut, 1995

PUBLICATIONS

THE NEW YORKER, “Bryan Graf/Melanie Willhide,” July 11 & 18, 2011, page 16.

ART LTD. MAGAZINE, “Melanie Willhide: “to Adrian Rodriguez with love” at Kaycee Olsen Gallery”, Jody Zellen,  July, 2011.

TO ADRIAN RODRIGUEZ WITH LOVE, Melanie Willhide, 2011.

LOS ANGELES TIMES/CULTURE MONSTER, “Art Review: Melanie Willhide at Kaycee Olsen Gallery,” Sharon Mizota, April 21, 2011.

FOIL_IANN MAGAZINE, “Melanie Willhide: The Belt of Venus,” Volume 3: A Silent Paper,
2009.

PHOTOWORLD MAGAZINE, “Melanie Willhide,” 2009.

DEAR PHOTOGRAPHER,  Jason Labbe, Phylum Press, New Haven, Connecticut, 2009.

CAMERAWORK, “Past is an image we form in the present,” Emma Tramposch,
Volume 35, No. 2 Fall/Winter 2008, pages 4 - 7.

BLINDSPOT, “Melanie Willhide,” October 2008, Issue 38.

ART INFO, “Chelsea Shows for the Thanksgiving Table: Bellwether Gallery, Melanie
Willhide, The Belt of Venus,” Jacqulen Lewis, November 19, 2007.

THE NEW YORK TIMES, Art in Review, “Dice Thrown (will Never Annul Chance),”
Roberta Smith, November 3, 2006, E34.

TIME OUT, “Dice Thrown,” Anne Doran,
November 2 - 8, 2006, Issue 579.

DRUNKEN BOAT, “Panliterary Awards,” 2006.

AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHY 19, 2003, picture 75.

PITCH WEEKLY, “Photo Realism: Seven Photographers Capture the Moments of Our
Lives,” April 10, 2003, page 23.

REVIEW, “Control, Escape, Delete,” February/March 2003, page 27.

V MAGAZINE, "Exposure,” January/February 2002, page 46.

BOSTON GLOBE, Living Arts Section, “Using Light to Touch and Transform,”
February 9, 2002, page 1.

PHOTO METRO, April, 2000, page 4.

CAMERAWORK, September, 2000.

EDUCATION

YALE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF ART
Master of Fine Art, Photography, 2002

RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN
Bachelor of Fine Art, Photography, 1999

JOHN CHIARA | "DIY Camera: John Chiara’s Giant Camera Obscura" — Review in Photo District News

© John Chiara John Chiara with his 50 x 80 camera on a trailer. To compose an image, he has to climb inside of it. To see images taken with his homemade cameras, click on the Photo Gallery link below.

Photo Gallery

By David Walker 

Crafting a unique image can require a photographer to think beyond the mass-produced tools of the photographic industry. In our DIY Issue we interviewed three photographers who built their own cameras in order to achieve the photographs they envisioned.

For San Francisco photographer John Chiara, the process of making landscape photographs inside a homemade, U-Haul-size camera obscura that he tows behind his SUV is part and parcel to the images themselves.

“The process I have developed comes out of a desire to make a certain type of image/object that you can’t make through traditional photographic processes,” he says. The huge, unwieldy camera makes the act of taking a picture an event in itself, and the image, he says, is the memory of the event.

The camera is constructed of wood and insulation foam, and mounted on a flatbed trailer. Inspired by the work of Carleton Watkins, Lewis Baltz, Henry Wessel and others, Chiara primarily photographs landscapes around the Bay Area. He makes the images directly on chromogenic paper rather than on film.

“Basically [the camera] gets ratcheted together in the field,” Chiara says. “You have to focus it mathematically, bolt the lens on, then you climb inside and check the focus and image, adhere the paper to the back of the camera, take the picture, take down the paper, put it in a lightproof roll, then take the camera back apart for transport.”

He crawls in and out of his camera through a lightproof plastic sleeve, and exposes the photographic paper by removing the lens cap. “While I am exposing the paper I am also dodging and burning and making adjustments to the color filtration.” The prints are so large that he uses a long section of plastic sewer pipe to process them.

“In the end it functions exactly like an early daguerreotype camera. I didn’t plan that, but that is the camera design that works best for what I am doing.”

Chiara built the camera in 2003. He says the challenges of making it functional are “too many to list.” The somewhat flimsy construction materials he used to build the camera made it easier for him to make design modifications, but they also require frequent repairs and adjustments.

Chiara says he uses “precision barrel lenses,” but it took a long time to find and modify them. “Usually lenses are symmetrical with the aperture in the center. I have taken mine apart, putting an element behind with the aperture in front, to create a traditional meniscus landscape lens.”

It isn’t Chiara’s first DIY camera. Fifteen years ago he started experimenting with a Linhof 4 x 5, exposing chromogenic paper directly. He liked the results so he constructed a 16 x 20 camera, which he used to make large, macro images of objects in his studio. Eventually, he says, “I felt the work was getting too heavy on precision, technique and effect.”


Read full review @ PDN