Juergen Teller

Juergen Teller depicts the German-born photographer in a print derived from a photographic source. Artz, herself trained as a portrait photographer, here turns the camera's record over to the woodblock: the image is decomposed into separately carved blocks, inked with water-based pigment, and printed in sequence onto washi with the baren. A portrait of a fellow photographer carries an implicit dialogue between two ways of fixing a likeness — one nearly instantaneous and chemical, the other slow, sequential, and physical. Continuous photographic tone becomes a small number of color planes; surface texture comes from the paper rather than the lens. Bokashi gradients handle transitions of light and shadow that the carved edge alone could not describe. Within Artz's portrait practice, this print belongs to a body of work in which sitters drawn from photography, art, science, and literature are registered through mokuhanga's particular logic of carving, inking, and registration.