Portrait of Torbert

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Tools of the Trade:
35mm single-lens reflex camera

I am very likely to stand in front of a scene or object and wait for it to tell me something. Photography is like a meditation for me. It is such a concentrated moment.

– Stephanie Torbert

 

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Torbert and Magritte
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Doorways, according to photographer Stephanie Torbert, open into spaces both real and imagined. In this untitled photograph she has nicknamed “Self-Service Sky,” the reflection in the door suggests a question about what is really behind the door. There are no details about the specific place and time. Here is just enough information to keep you guessing about what’s real and what isn’t.

Remember in the film version The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy’s house lands in Oz? She opens the door of her black-and-white Kansas home and steps out into the full-color world of Oz. The transformation takes place when Dorothy opens the door. Stephanie Torbert isn’t so interested in the full-color world of Oz as she is in checking out that door.

“The sky is through the door and it’s refrigerated,” says Torbert, “preserved perfectly blue with clouds. There is something about the idea of ‘self-service sky’ that I love because it is kind of whimsical. It could be the worst gray day in the world and you could just open this door and serve yourself and out would come this wonderful blue sky with white clouds.”

 
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"A lot of my early work… was about what I call the surrealism of every day life."
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A lot of my work has doors in it, or the suggestion of doors. We all open the same door many times over and over and each time we open it new light comes in, different air, a fresh experience, an old experience slips out and gets loose in the room.

– Stephanie Torbert

“Something I have worked with a lot in many of my images is cutting out extra material to lead you to believe something that may or may not be true,” says Stephanie Torbert. Are we outside looking through an entryway? Are we inside an entryway looking through a doorway? Torbert leaves the information we need to answer these questions out of the frame of the photograph.

The red bands of neon that perfectly frame the numbers painted on the window also function as a puzzle–they appear to pierce the wooden frame around the window and continue their path inside. Or is it their reflection that we see on the glass? “Outside in, or inside out?” Torbert seems to ask in many of the photographs she made at the end of the 1960s. “A lot of my early work, especially the reflections, was about what I call the surrealism of everyday life,” she explains, “picking out the strangeness in the world we live in. Those doors are doors that could lead you to other worlds, or what is behind what is in front of you.”

 
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"The light on this pillar was just so amazing to me."
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“I took this picture while I was on a road trip in Colorado. It was during the time that there was gas rationing and I was waiting in line to get gas,” recalls photographer Stephanie Torbert. “The light on this pillar was just so amazing to me. There is this magical quality to it, as if it is saying ‘there is more to be had up here.’ It’s about a passageway up to another world.”

When Torbert was making these kinds of pictures at the end of the 1960s, it was unusual for art photographers to work with color film. It began when Torbert visited an advertising agency and someone there wondered what she could shoot in color. “I went to a department store,” said Torbert, “and started taking color pictures. I didn’t end up doing anything commercial at the time, but maybe it nudged me in the color direction.” It was a direction that would last for more than 30 years.

 
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"… it's about the kind of confusion that leads you to a new world."
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Metaphors in works of art draw our attention away from the exact meaning of a depicted image, and remind us of similar qualities in something else. A metaphor is not the same as a symbol, which stands for something else (like a flat, red octagon stands for the action “stop”). In a metaphor, the meaning between the objects and ideas is similar, yet different. In Stephanie Torbert’s work, windows and doors are metaphors for passageways into other worlds. They show you the way to a different reality. Literally, a window is an opening in a wall. It becomes a metaphor when Torbert uses it to question our positions in the outdoor and indoor worlds we inhabit.

“It’s meant to confuse the viewer, in sort of a special way,” explains Torbert. “Not as if you are standing on a street corner and you’re lost, and you don’t feel good because you’re lost. It’s not about that kind of confusion, it’s about the kind of confusion that leads you to a new world.”

 
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"I was so struck by all those shiny black cars with the red neon reflections on them."
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“I shot this on a trip to the Minnesota North Shore, on Lake Superior,” says Stephanie Torbert. “I pulled into this motel. I didn’t stay there, I just happened on it. I was so struck by all those shiny black cars with the red neon reflections on them.”

There is little doubt that the building is a motel; the architecture and the parked cars announce it. Why are there bed pillows resting outside a motel room in the car? The position of the pillows in the car look as if part of the motel room has been brought outside. What belongs outside and what belongs inside?

“Another thing that I didn’t think about when I made this picture but that I see now is this little rearview mirror on the side of the car,” says Torbert. “It’s like a tiny little world all its own. It’s hard to tell what’s in the mirror, but I know this landscape and I bet it’s a pine tree. There is a little piece of what is behind you in front of you.”

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Developing an idea
 

I don’t even like telling people that there are paintings in the flower work because in a sense it is not important. It is if you want to know how to make them, but probably you wouldn’t be able to make them anyway because I made them. You make your own weird thing.

– Stephanie Torbert

“This is the very first of a whole series of flowers that I did over ten years,” says Stephanie Torbert about her photograph Protean Landscape. “ I did it just as an experiment and I liked it so much that it led to ten more years of work.” The experiment began as painting and drawing, and eventually Torbert combined her landscapes with flowers to create something totally new.

Protea is the name of the flower in the picture, but “Protean” means changeable, variable, assuming different forms or characters. Proteus was a god of classical mythology who could take on different forms at will.

The title of the picture is a play on words that describes Torbert’s sense of the natural world. “I am very much concerned about the environment and the connections between what is very beautiful and what is very sinister,” she muses. “People have moved things all over the world and because of moving things they have created environments that aren’t really natural. Instead they’re threatening. The combination of a natural form with an unnatural backdrop makes something that appears to be natural.”

 

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"A lot of my work is about… walking that edge between two worlds."

“There is this old Joni Mitchell song,” says Stephanie Torbert, “that goes, ‘They took all the trees, put them in a tree museum, and charged all the people a dollar and a half just to see ‘em.’ That lyric runs through a lot of my work in some sense. It’s about how we change the world in strange ways, how we perceive the alienation we feel, and a kind of playfulness along with the alienation.”

This photograph and its title suggest that combination of alienation and playfulness. The lighting that gives the blossom its inner glow and the strange landscape in the background makes this banana plant look as though it is flowering on Mars. The word “wand” is in the title because Torbert wanted to add an element of magic to the flower, and the suggestion of its ability to transform itself and its surroundings.

“ I worked for many years as a naturalist in a wildflower garden,” explains Torbert, “and although these pictures don’t relate to that work I became aware of the environment and what we are doing to it.” Attraction to the beauty of nature and fear for the endangered environment comes together in Torbert’s flower series. “A lot of my work is about that,” she says, “walking that edge between two worlds.” The chorus to that old Joni Mitchell song? “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you got ‘till it’s gone? They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.” (Joni Michell, Big Yellow Taxi, 1974)

 

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"There is something about using the energy of the actual space when I am shooting that is very crucial to me."
 

One time I brought a portfolio of my work over to the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden, and showed it to a researcher whose hobby it was to photograph wildflowers. He made very pretty little black-and-white pictures. I showed him some of my flower pictures, one of them was this very pointy looking flower, and he was horrified. He said, “You sell these things? This looks like blood!”

–Stephanie Torbert

in•flo•res•cence (in/flo/res/ens,), n. 1. a flowering or blossoming. 2. Bot. a. the arrangement of flowers on the axis. b. the flowering part of a plant. c. the flower cluster. d. flowers collectively. e. a single flower. (The American College Dictionary)

Unique to this image is Stephanie Torbert’s use of two negatives sandwiched in the enlarger. The whole picture is composed of a drawing and two negatives. “I usually don’t do that,” she says. “Often people ask me if I do these on the computer. There is something about using the energy of the actual space when I am shooting that is very crucial to me. There is also something about the lighting that I don’t think would happen if I did it on the computer.”

The flowers are really about Torbert’s inner world and her feelings about the endangered environment. Human intervention in the rhythms of nature that change and transform the world are a part of how Torbert talks about her work and this photograph specifically. “The energy that takes place in the creation of all of that comes from a deep psychological source for me,” says Torbert. In this abstract picture Torbert maps out that inner landscape.

 

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30 Years Apart
 

I just saw a movie where the people are supposed to choose a moment that is going to be the memory that will stay with them forever when they die. The process of doing that is a very peculiar thing, you could take the most wonderful memory ever and put in that context, to be stuck with that forever, is pretty terrible. There is something about that that I think is present in my work.

– Stephanie Torbert

I was in California at the Huntington Botanical Gardens and I saw this big cactus that was blooming. It had a great big white flower, and I had my binoculars as well as my camera, so I took my binoculars out and I looked right into the center of this flower. I just gasped because it was so amazingly beautiful. No one could see that close because you had to stay on the path, and I started handing my binoculars to strangers that were gathering around. I said “you have to look into the center of that flower!”

They were all just astounded, and they said, “Who would ever know, who would guess that it was so beautiful in the center of that flower!” So there’s the combination of that kind of feeling along with knowing that a lot of these things are endangered. They may become extinct if they are placed in environments where they are not naturally grown. A lot of my work is about that, walking that edge between those two worlds.

– Stephanie Torbert

 
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