Amazing Grace, How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost, but now am found
T’was blind but now I see
From the spiritual “Amazing Grace”
By Elin Spring
Long gone is the idea that photographs are authentic records. Rather, it has become much more accurate to say that all photographs lie. But what if a leap of faith leads us on a more curious and rewarding journey? Photographers Amani Willett, Jon Horvath, Walker Pickering and Barbara Diener each spin their ostensibly factual images into extraordinary myths born of memory, faith and desire at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA through March 1st, 2020.

Installation view of The Disappearance of Joseph Plummer by Amani Willett (courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography). Photo by Elin Spring.
Amani Willett’s “The Disappearance of Joseph Plummer” is a breathtaking, immersive installation based on his book of the same name (Overlapse, 2017). The premise is a search for details about a hermit who lived in the central NH wilderness over 200 years ago. When Willett’s father bought some of this land, their shared pursuit of facts about Joseph Plummer turned up scant and elusive specifics, heightening their curiosity and fueling the photographer’s fabrication of an embellished legend. To Willett, Joseph Plummer’s societal desertion echoes his own desire to “disappear into the landscape,” to relish “the mystery of the unknowable,” and to embrace the romance of getting lost.

“Untitled (In the Woods)” from The Disappearance of Joseph Plummer by Amani Willett (courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography).
In images large and small, variously framed or adhered flatly to the wall, in B&W and color, panoramas and close-ups, singular, grouped and collaged, Willett stages an assemblage of clues. The largest photographs are perhaps the most mystical and mesmerizing: a figure wandering in the woods, observed through a textured veil of white filaments; an ethereal portrait of the pensive hermit thrown into deep shadow. The sequencing and variety is as spellbinding as a detective story. At the core are Willett’s stunning photographs, woven ever so suggestively into an alluring, lingering mystery.

“Untitled (Portrait)” from The Disappearance of Joseph Plummer by Amani Willett (courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography).

Installation view of This Is Bliss by Jon Horvath (courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography). Photo by Elin Spring.
Jon Horvath’s “This Is Bliss” shares the Main Gallery and some outward similarities with Willett’s fantasy. Horvath’s is a much more concrete gathering of evidence, about a real town – Bliss, Idaho – that boasts about 300 residents and a storied past along the Oregon Trail. Discovered on a cross-country road trip during a period of personal transition, Horvath could not resist following the simple road sign to a town that offered such promise. His initial encounter led to more over several years, during which Horvath built a realistic-looking collection of images and ephemera into a richly layered legend.

“Elden” from the series This Is Bliss by Jon Horvath (courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography).

From the series This Is Bliss by Jon Horvath (courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography).
A trio of order tabs from the local diner is scribbled with a concise summary of the town, stating that life in the hamlet is “simple but not simplistic.” Horvath’s images, too, are individually straightforward – a man lost in thought by the roadside, a lone dog trotting alongside a lit building at night – but develop into a complex assessment. Black and white views like “Skipping Stones Across the Snake River Canyon (after Evel),” “Points of Entry, Points of Exit, NSEW” or a grid of wet-plate collodion frames alternating between tumbleweed and beer bottles collected from a highway turnoff convey the paradoxical sensation of time passing and standing still. A seemingly apt metaphor for life in Bliss.

“Points of Entry, Points of Exit, NSEW” from the series This Is Bliss by Jon Horvath (courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography).

“United We Stand, 2011” from the series Nearly West by Walker Pickering (courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography).
In “Nearly West,” Walker Pickering revisits the west Texas town of Odessa, where he was born but had not returned for twenty years. Convinced that the place would be true to his childhood memory, Pickering instead found “something akin to a movie set, where everything was a façade and smaller than I remembered.” His square, intimate frames (15”x 15” each) are colorful cameos. At once completely representational and yet utterly ambiguous, Pickering ponders nature, architecture, and interior detail with equal scrutiny, freezing time like a still-life. Pickering’s attempts to “go home again” instead conceive “an imagined life built on the fantasy that we’d stayed.”

“Hole, 2009” from the series Nearly West by Walker Pickering (courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography).

“Meal, 2009” from the series Nearly West by Walker Pickering (courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography).

Installation view of Phantom Power by Barbara Diener courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography).
In “Phantom Power” (Daylight, 2018) Barbara Diener explores our persistent “desire to believe that something else happens after we die,” that some spiritual remnant endures. Long curious about religion and spirituality, the sudden loss of her father many years ago recently combined with Diener meeting a woman who fervently believes in “the spectral.” Such intense faith sparked a skeptical Diener to visually re-craft photographs in the vein of those created by paranormal investigators since the 1860’s. Utilizing natural scenes from forests to more intimate spaces like stairways and bedrooms, Diener layers her compositions with vivid colors, spacey light patterns and auras of fire and smoke. The juxtaposition of vibrant paranormal spectacles with the knowledge that they were meticulously constructed with modern technology underlines Diener’s essential questions surrounding certainty versus ambiguity. Like Willett, Horvath and Pickering, Diener’s photographs defy the truth, instead immortalizing the amazing human capacity to take a leap of faith.

“Green + Stairs” from Phantom Power by Barbara Diener courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography).

“Infrared Tree” from Phantom Power by Barbara Diener courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography).
For more information about these exhibitions and artists, go to: https://griffinmuseum.org/exhibitions/

Feature Image: “Untitled, collage (Winter Swim)” from The Disappearance of Joseph Plummer by Amani Willett (courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography).