Vermont Center for Photography Reopens with “NOW IS ALWAYS”
By Maggie Pavao
Trained as a master printmaker in silver gelatin prints and asphaltum-based photogravures, artist Vaune Trachtman began feeling the negative effects of the toxic chemicals on her body and now works in a contemporary photogravure process using photopolymer plates. Since graduating from NYU-ICP’s joint program, Trachtman has experimented in the medium, creating haunting dreamlike images imbued with melancholy and nostalgia. And just as her process combines history with modern materials, so does her work: NOW IS ALWAYS composites photographs taken nearly a century apart, transforming memories into dreams.
The inaugural exhibition at the Vermont Center for Photography’s new space in Brattleboro, NOW IS ALWAYS superimposes Trachtman’s late father’s photographs over her own. Losing her parents at an early age, Vaune reconnects with the father she never knew through the discovery of his negatives: she incorporates his images, those faces familiar to him, together with her own photographs, scenes familiar to her taken out the windows of cars, trains, and airplanes. A nomad in her youth and early adulthood, Vaune became accustomed to these vistas, the “spaces between places,” the backdrop for a life spent in transit. Her hurried images, many featuring erratic strands of light set against soft shadows, frame her father's quiet portraiture shot from his Philadelphia street corner. In NOW IS ALWAYS, Trachtman masterfully weaves together the analog and the digital, fact and fiction, past and present.
Reverie, NOW IS ALWAYS, 2021
Reverie, a favorite from the series, manages to convey a quiet stillness while featuring an image snapped from the back of a rumbling airplane. The hazy landscape unfurls and a portrait of a woman emerges; her gaze falls towards the earth as if it were her visage reflected in that airplane window. The landscape’s winding irrigation channels echo veins on the skin’s surface, the woman’s delicate facial features hover over the rolling topography below.
Seamlessly integrating his Depression-era portraits into her present-day landscapes, the artist considers the series to be a collaboration, an intimate dialogue between father and daughter, between his 20th-century characters and her iPhone images. Throughout the series, we find ourselves immersed in Trachtman’s “collapsed-yet-expanded time,” suspended between time and place, where, in the midst of our own fast-paced lives, we are encouraged to slow down, reflect, and look to the past to inform our future.
NOW IS ALWAYS
September 3–October 31, 2021
Vermont Center for Photography
10 Green Street
Brattleboro, VT 05301
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