Artist Talk: Lisa Oppenheim (Video)

Artist Lisa Oppenheim speaks about her recent projects involving photographic prints exposed using non-traditional light sources.

On November 19, in collaboration with the Department of Photography at Parsons the New School for Design, Aperture hosted a talk with artist Lisa Oppenheim. Two of Oppenheim’s recent projects involve photographic prints exposed using nontraditional light sources: for her series Smoke, Oppenheim solarized images of fire, explosions, and smoke with an open flame; for Lunagrams, she exposed contact prints of the moon to moonlight.

The images for both series were often sourced from the public domain. In Smoke, the works’ titles include detailed descriptions and dates for the historical events from which the negatives were sourced. Lunagrams consisted of new prints based on the work of John and Henry Draper, credited with creating the first telescopic photographs of the moon and other celestial bodies in the mid-nineteenth century. A portfolio of Oppenheim’s photographs was featured in Aperture magazine’s Summer 2013 issue, Curiosity, with an introduction by Brian Sholis.

View “Artist Talk: Lisa Oppenheim,” Part 2, and Part 3 on Vimeo.


Aperture magazine’s Summer 2013 issue, Curiosity, is now available.