Amnesia 2009 ht. 17” x w. w.15.2” inkjet pigment print from the Naked Eye series.

Erica Baum is a New York based artist. Recent exhibitions in 2015- 2016 include Photo-Poetics: An Anthology, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Reconstructions: Recent Acquisitions in Photography and Video, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and The Following Information, Bureau New York. Her books include, Sightings, (onestar press 2010) Dog Ear, (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011) and The Naked Eye, (Crèvecœur/œ Paris & Bureau New York 2015).

Question:

I have noticed that artists focus on a media product as its place in our society is waning. The most notable example, for me, is Christian Marclay’s visual recycling of vinyl records in a time when they were being replaced by CDs and mp3s. In that context I can see your work as an elegy for print and its institutional byproducts – the library and the pre-digital classroom? Clearly your work has more breadth than that, but does the threatened demise of print motivate your work? Are your manipulations and subtle still lifes of slightly unfolded pages a bid to give print a new life (to awaken the dead)?

Answer:

My work has always been about the quotidian. The objects I’ve chosen to photograph, blackboards, card catalogues, books were chosen because they were part of my daily life. The life of the library, the life of the reader.  It’s about re-experiencing, re-looking at something recognizable that can contain within it other experiences.
It’s only over time that these objects, chosen to reflect daily use, began to acquire an element of obsolescence. Any photograph can operate as a document, a reflection of a moment in time, and a moment that then can acquire meaning over time. Because the objects I’ve chosen have started to get replaced, the blackboard by the smartboard, the card catalogue by the search engine and the book by the ebook there is a documentary quality to the work which while I can embrace the added meaning was never the initial intention. Conversely the Internet facilitates DIY publishing, the ebook makes us appreciate the tactile material qualities of a physical book and production and demand for artists books has increased. My work began and continues to be a celebration of our engagement with the physical world of information.

untitled (Irrational) 1998 ht. 20″ x w. 24″ gelatin silver print from the Card Catalogue series

untitled (Wave) 1995 ht. 20″x w.24″ gelatin silver print from the Blackboard series