“This is the other side of America, where fame doesn’t always intersect with true talent, and where the truly gifted often inhabit domains of their own hermetic, unseen, unheralded, but always present in the quakes and flux of our cultural landscape.”
– Johnathan Williams, "A Palabale Elysium/ Portraits of Genius and Solitude"

Graham Bury and Danielle Rubi’s exquisitely rendered photographic portraits combine a style that is more 1906 than 2006 with a large-scale format that is innovative and contemporary. Employing the antique Van Dyke process Bury and Rubi unearth regional notables and elevate them to the status of cultural icons. At once a photographic exhibit and a site-specific installation, the seventeen images of Unearthed hang in an idyllic garden setting, each piece suspended from its own freestanding armature.

Shunning digital alternatives, Bury and Rubi embrace epic proportions never before seen with the Van Dyke process.  Printing with Van Dyke chemistry requires a large format negative in the size of the desired print and sunlight to expose the image. The artists established an outdoor studio that capitalizes on Santa Barbara’s temperate climate and reimagined the regional tradition of plein air art production.  Here, the terrestrial paradise is not simply a backdrop, but an active element of process. 

Creating heroically scaled portraits of Santa Barbara’s quiet innovators, Bury and Rubi explore many grand precedents of portrait photography, while offering a wry critique of today's media version of cultural production in California. Unearthed highlights Santa Barbara’s visionaries, indviduals whose local, national and international contributions are rarely matched in public attention, yet whose vitality, energy, and sensibility anticipate new directions in contemporary society.  In lieu of an outright rejection of present-day celebrity, Bury and Rubi insert their own selections into the canon of recognizable figures.  

The seventeen subjects suggest a curated statement of values—innovation, sustainability, pacifism, design, character and commitment.   The artists’ interest in social issues reflects a shift away from the utopian practices of modernism and toward, in Nicolas Bourriaud’s words, “learning to inhabit the world in a better way.” Unearthed contributes alternatives rather than critiques.

Rubi and Bury present each subject in a way that reflects their character and cultural contribution. The artists solicited active input from their subjects, creating an environment of spontaneity and play. As a result these photographs have a performative realism, falling somewhere between careful staging and documentary reportage.

If Bury and Rubi’s work can be described as an evolving cultural portraiture, they are in very good company.  Since the 1970s California artists such as Catherine Opie and David Hockney have documented regional figures in a narrative fashion.  The minimal, architectural settings and antique processes of Hiroshi Sugimoto also come to mind. Like the work of these influential artists, the portraits of Unearthed reflect many of the internal contradictions for which Santa Barbara has been known: from its paradoxical nature as a paved paradise where the natural beauty of mountains, valleys, and beaches coexist, often uneasily, with a man-made landscape of freeways and strip malls.  The city has long had a reputation as a trendsetter, yet there is a conservatism inherent in the perfected order of its planned Mission-Revival architecture. Even considering that such dichotomies are inevitably oversimplications, it’s no wonder that so many provocative ideas are produced here. In the Unearthed portraits, there is an apt dissonance between the lushly classical patina of the antique photographic technique and the forward-looking and innovative nature of the individuals portrayed.
– Elizabeth Lovero, Curator

The Unearthed series is currently available for viewing. Please arrange
a studio visit by contacting the artists. The artists are currently looking
for a gallery space in the Santa Barbara and Los Angeles area for exhibition in 2007. Commission work is also welcome.

Danielle Rubi / *email / 510.495.4774 / *rubiphotography.com
Graham Bury / *email / 805.453.6908