Lisa Oppenheim

Untitled (Governor of Ohio Judson Harmon)

The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material. For this project, Oppenheim procured the original glass negatives, which had been damaged over time, from the archives of this newspaper. She then printed the negatives as is, highlighting the multitude of physical flaws that had ‘spoiled’ the negatives. Pairing these distorted and decaying images with their original newspaper captions, the abstracted images and specificity of the texts collide, opening up the imagery to new and imagined interpretations.

Struggling towards clarity, the patterns and forms contained within the images are only defined by the positive and negative (black and white) spaces of the compositions. For example, Untitled (Ruby Downing Sitting Between Two Unidentified Men in a Room)depicts an amorphous congregation of pools and splotches. With the context muddied by time, the detailed caption provokes questions and considerations concerning the protagonists and context of the imagery—who is Ruby Downing? What room? Why was this a newsworthy event? Similarly, Untitled (Joseph T. Robinson Standing at a Podium in a Room) presents only a frenetic constellation of almost pixelated spots, like static on a screen. While, Untitled (Governor of Ohio Judson Harmon) illustrates a fluid, almost gaseous ball of energy, like a fire set ablaze. Embracing the physical erasure of the content, Oppenheim’s project underscores how temporal distance changes the interpretations of a historical event, while also demonstrating how what is considered newsworthy shifts over time.