Quinhagak, Bethel, Nikolai
by Claire Raymond, University of Virginia, January 2019
This series of 18 images was taken in three villages along the Kuskokwim River, approximately along the 61st parallel north in Alaska. Photogravure, the technique used to print the photographs, is a painstaking, labor intensive intaglio printing process combining photography with print-making. The sense of the artist giving her time and full and deep attention to the images emerges seamlessly from the images' subject matter combined with the photogravure process. A quality of patience, of waiting in a place until the place reveals itself into image through details of natural and man-made objects-- trees, wheelbarrow, bird house, industrial hose, laundry, field, plastic bucket, sky, wind, water, boat-- permeates the photographs. They bring a quality of still life to scenes that are not staged but rather waited for. Awaited. The images have a sense of arriving from the place of being awaited. The natural and manmade worlds fuse here not in harmony but in the angular vertigo of a spare and realistic gaze.
Bailey's photogravures often show objects that imply human presence rather than showing people. The images that do show people do so without interrupting or estranging the human form from landscape, whether that's a domestic landscape by a house, a boat, or spaces at the edges of water and tundra. This is a landscape created by people and the people, when they appear, are articulated as creators of their own world. Bailey subtly creates a feminist landscape, one that refuses to pretend the domestic is not always with us.
There is a keen edge of vulnerability in Quinhagak, Bethel, Nikolai: the vulnerability of the natural world to human forces; the vulnerability to time and the elements of the objects and structures that people make; and also the vulnerability of people in mortal time, space, and environmental change. The landscape articulates liminality-- the border zone of river, the far north, the perimeter, hinterlands, in a time of drastic environmental change. Gerald Vizenor's concept of survivance comes to mind in viewing these images. Bailey, present as photographer, is part of this code of survivance. The photographer is present not as a tourist of others' worlds but as a part of that world, her industrial machinery--the camera-- no different from other aspects of industry shown in the photographs. And yet, by choosing to print in photogravure Bailey instates a resistance to the totalizing forces of 21st century industrialization. Photogravure is not, for her, a technique of nostalgia but of critique and resistance.
Shadows become objects themselves in these umbrageous plates, suggesting time's passage but also its stillness. Many of the objects photographed are mysterious, so specific to the life of the people on this river as to be fully readable only by them. The photographer's relationship to the people who live here does not appear to be that of daughter nor of chronicler but of witness. The camera is positioned not in command of the landscape but politely, reverentially, at an oblique angle to it. What will happen to this landscape as global warming melts the permafrost? Bailey's camera allies itself to the liminality of the place. The photograph of the woman holding a bowl and offering it to us is paradigmatic. We cannot entirely see what is in the bowl but we see the woman's gesture of making us an offer. Likewise, the image of a glove aloft on a laundry line, echoing the woman’s hands immersed in work below, represents the sense of vertigo that characterizes the whole group: that the earth, the river, everything built near the river, all tilt but hold on.
by Claire Raymond, University of Virginia, January 2019
This series of 18 images was taken in three villages along the Kuskokwim River, approximately along the 61st parallel north in Alaska. Photogravure, the technique used to print the photographs, is a painstaking, labor intensive intaglio printing process combining photography with print-making. The sense of the artist giving her time and full and deep attention to the images emerges seamlessly from the images' subject matter combined with the photogravure process. A quality of patience, of waiting in a place until the place reveals itself into image through details of natural and man-made objects-- trees, wheelbarrow, bird house, industrial hose, laundry, field, plastic bucket, sky, wind, water, boat-- permeates the photographs. They bring a quality of still life to scenes that are not staged but rather waited for. Awaited. The images have a sense of arriving from the place of being awaited. The natural and manmade worlds fuse here not in harmony but in the angular vertigo of a spare and realistic gaze.
Bailey's photogravures often show objects that imply human presence rather than showing people. The images that do show people do so without interrupting or estranging the human form from landscape, whether that's a domestic landscape by a house, a boat, or spaces at the edges of water and tundra. This is a landscape created by people and the people, when they appear, are articulated as creators of their own world. Bailey subtly creates a feminist landscape, one that refuses to pretend the domestic is not always with us.
There is a keen edge of vulnerability in Quinhagak, Bethel, Nikolai: the vulnerability of the natural world to human forces; the vulnerability to time and the elements of the objects and structures that people make; and also the vulnerability of people in mortal time, space, and environmental change. The landscape articulates liminality-- the border zone of river, the far north, the perimeter, hinterlands, in a time of drastic environmental change. Gerald Vizenor's concept of survivance comes to mind in viewing these images. Bailey, present as photographer, is part of this code of survivance. The photographer is present not as a tourist of others' worlds but as a part of that world, her industrial machinery--the camera-- no different from other aspects of industry shown in the photographs. And yet, by choosing to print in photogravure Bailey instates a resistance to the totalizing forces of 21st century industrialization. Photogravure is not, for her, a technique of nostalgia but of critique and resistance.
Shadows become objects themselves in these umbrageous plates, suggesting time's passage but also its stillness. Many of the objects photographed are mysterious, so specific to the life of the people on this river as to be fully readable only by them. The photographer's relationship to the people who live here does not appear to be that of daughter nor of chronicler but of witness. The camera is positioned not in command of the landscape but politely, reverentially, at an oblique angle to it. What will happen to this landscape as global warming melts the permafrost? Bailey's camera allies itself to the liminality of the place. The photograph of the woman holding a bowl and offering it to us is paradigmatic. We cannot entirely see what is in the bowl but we see the woman's gesture of making us an offer. Likewise, the image of a glove aloft on a laundry line, echoing the woman’s hands immersed in work below, represents the sense of vertigo that characterizes the whole group: that the earth, the river, everything built near the river, all tilt but hold on.