Vaune Trachtman
Reverie, from NOW IS ALWAYS, 2021
Direct to plate photopolymer gravure with a surface roll, Akua ink on Shiramine washi paper, 21” x 28” image on 28” x 34” sheet
This work began during the Great Depression when my father took some photos near his father's drugstore in Philadelphia. Nearly 90 years later, I was given his negatives, which I then combined with my own images. NOW IS ALWAYS is our collaboration across time.
My father lived in Philly his entire life. His images of friends and neighbors are rooted in one place and time. My images are less rooted. This is probably because I was mostly on my own after my parents died—my father when I was five; my mother when I was 15. After that, I was rarely in one place for very long. Often the view out a car or train window felt more like home than wherever I was living. Over time, I've developed a kinship with blurred bridges and the husks of industrial towns racing by at two or three in the morning. In this work, my father's life becomes part of these landscapes—our shared and evanescent homes.
In NOW IS ALWAYS, I want to create a sense of collapsed-yet-expanded time. Yes, I want to see what my father saw, and yes, I want him to see what I see—but I also want the viewer to look at the past, and I want the past to look right back. I want viewer and subject to feel each other’s gaze. By combining images taken almost a century apart, I also want to integrate layers of technology and image-making history: his 1930s point-and-shoot, my iPhone, his silver-gelatin negatives, my Photoshop files, and the traditions of ink, elbow grease, and an intaglio press.
ARTIST BIO
Vaune Trachtman is a photographer and printmaker whose images explore the evanescence of dreams and memory. Using the photopolymer gravure method, she creates works that "seem more like emanations than photographs" (Mark Feeney, Boston Globe), while her attentiveness to the "transitory reach of light" leads to moments of "fleeting, wondrous, sacred habitation" (Collier Brown, Od Review).
Vaune is included in the top 50 of Photolucida's Critical Mass, and she has been a semifinalist in the Print Center's 95th and 97th ANNUAL International Competitions. She was a 2022 finalist and People's Choice Award Winner in Klompching Gallery's FRESH ANNUAL. Her series NOW IS ALWAYS received solo exhibitions at the Griffin Museum of Photography and the Vermont Center for Photography, and was named a Top Portfolio by Rfotofolio and an Outstanding Work by the Denis Roussel Awards. She has been shortlisted for the international Hariban Award, and was a winner of the Alternative Processes National Competition. Vaune is a recipient of grants from the Adolf & Esther Gottlieb Foundation, the Berkshire Taconic Foundation, and the Vermont Arts Council and NEA. Vaune received her M.A. from New York University and the International Center of Photography. She lives in Brattleboro, Vermont.
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