Robert Fichter Large Format Polaroid Photograph Still Life Color Photo Dye Print Robert Fichter, 1980

Description

Robert Fichter
Title: Jonah
Date: 1980
Original Polaroid Large Format Print (Photo-Internal dye diffusion transfer)
Location: Cambridge Massachusetts United States … more Robert Fichter
Title: Jonah
Date: 1980
Original Polaroid Large Format Print (Photo-Internal dye diffusion transfer)
Location: Cambridge Massachusetts United States
Dimensions: Image: 27 1/2 x 20 1/2 in. (69.9 x 52.1 cm), Paper: 29 1/4 x 21 1/2 in. (74.3 x 54.6 cm)
This depicts a large mouth fish with a toy soldier and Asian art (tattoo art?) in an abstract assemblage collage.


From "Five Still Lifes"
New York: Paradox Editions, Ltd., 1980. 5 original Polaroid color prints. Each hand signed, titled, dated and numbered 37/40 in ink in the margin. Each approximately 24 x 20in (image size). Each is on original as there are no negatives in this process. The photographers included: Robert Cumming, Robert Fichter, Betty Hahn, Victor Schrager and William Wegman. The photos were produced in the Polaroid Corporation’s 20×24 studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This is an internal Dye Diffusion print (large format) Polaroid print. These are exceedingly rare now. This format was used by many of the leading photographers of the second half of the 20th century, among them Peter Beard, Chuck Close, David Levinthal, Robert Frank, David Hockney, Lucas Samaras, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe and, perhaps most significantly, Ansel Adams More recently Ellen Carey has created large abstract masterpieces using this format.

Robert W. Fichter
Robert Witten Fichter (born 1939) is an American photographer. Beginning in the 1960s, Fichter was at the forefront of experimental photography,combining drawing, hand photoengraving processes and photographic images in his photographic practice which he called Print-Photo-Fusion. Fichter has had more than forty solo exhibitions, including a major retrospective, Robert Fichter: Photography and Other Questions, in 1982. Originating at the George Eastman International Museum of Photography, Rochester, New York, this exhibition toured the country from 1982-85. He has also participated in hundreds of group exhibitions. Fichter has also published extensively, coordinated numerous photography exhibitions and given lectures across the USA.
Born in Fort Myers, Florida in 1939, Robert Whitten Fichter spent his early childhood in Sarasota, where the ruins of circus impresario John Ringling’s unfinished Ritz-Carlton Hotel left an indelible impression on him; the artist frequently explored the clash between decaying civilization and fecund nature in his work. Fichter first took up the camera as yearbook photographer at his high school, and was also inspired to pursue art by his older sister, who trained as an abstract expressionist painter. While attending the University of Florida at Gainesville (1959-63), Fichter studied Anthropology before switching majors to Fine Arts. He studied printmaking with Ken Kerslake and photography with Jerry Uelsmann, who encouraged him to pursue an MFA under photographer Henry Holmes Smith at the University of Indiana (1963-66). Upon graduating, Fichter worked with Nathan Lyons as an Assistant Curator at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, where he had a solo exhibition in 1968. In 1982, curator Robert Sobieszek organized a major retrospective of his work at the George Eastman Museum that also traveled to the Fine Arts Gallery, Florida State University, Tallahassee; Frederick White Gallery, UCLA; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College (Chicago); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Art Museum, University of New Mexico; and the Brooklyn Museum. Fichter joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles in 1968. In 1972, he returned to Florida to take a position at Florida State University in Tallahassee, where he remained until his retirement in 2006. He also held visiting positions at UCLA (1976) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1977).
Fichter has exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada (1970), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1974), School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1974), Kunsthaus Zurich (1977), Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies (1981), Whitney Biennial (1981), University of South Florida Art Galleries (1984), Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina (1986), and the Gallery of Art, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls (1990).
Fichter’s work is included in the collections of the Center for Creative Photography, George Eastman Museum, High Museum, International Center of Photography, Los Angeles County Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography, National Gallery of Art, and Norton Simon Museum, among others.
In 2006, the artist donated his archive of drawings, prints, photographs, paintings, preparatory materials, and manuscripts to the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. less