Exhibition Review IV: Thanksgiving Trip to Salt Lake City, Utah: Tillman Crane's Jordan River Photographs at the Salt Lake Art Center

Tillman Crane, Swimming Hole, 2006.

With little knowledge of Salt Lake City, much less its contemporary art scene, other than Joseph Smith’s spiritual revelations, polygamy, and ornate Mormon temples, I was intrigued to make the eleven-hour drive to my best friend’s Utah home for the Thanksgiving holiday. Admittedly skeptical about critical, radical art produced in the city where most of its inhabitants don conservative, white undergarments under their clothing as a symbolic reminder of the sacred covenants of Mormonism and as a literal source of protection from the world’s evils, I ventured to the Salt Lake Art Center to view their current exhibitions, located just a block from the central Mormon temple from which all streets in Salt Lake radiate outward. Its mission statement claiming to “encourage contemporary visual artists and art which challenge and educate public perceptions of civil, social and aesthetic issues affecting society,” I suspected that should analytical and engaging artwork be found in Salt Lake, it would likely be at the Art Center.

Entering the photography exhibit of contemporary writer and artist, Tillman Crane, I was surrounded by a plethora of images concerning one of Utah’s most vital waterways, the Jordan River. Former mayor of Salt Lake City and now current Director of the Utah Rivers Council, Ted Wilson, coincidentally happens to be my best friend’s stepfather, and educated me on the river’s redemptive history throughout our walk through of the exhibit. Originally marking the boundary between civilization and the rugged unknown of the west, the Jordan River quickly became polluted and unusable in the age of industrial revolution and Mormon settlement in the early 1900s. It was not until the 1970s that a series of laws enacted under the Environmental Protection Agency led to gradual cleanup and protection of the Jordan. Crane’s photographs document the Jordan River from its source at Utah Lake to its mouth at the Great Salt Lake. In most of the photographs, Crane depicts the river in its natural state, while in others there is evidence of human interruption, engineering, and re-routing. Crane works with large format cameras to produce palladium prints that appear metallic and slightly washed out, lending an air of mysticism to the photographs.

In the photograph, Swimming Hole, Redwood Road (2006), Tillman’s camera captures a warped, twisting tree overlooking a spot of the river frequented for summer swimming sessions. Heavy contrast evades the image, the river’s water and fallen branches pervading its ripples falling almost transparent behind the dark tree in the foreground. The photograph appears calm and still with little movement depicted in the river or the tree’s leaves, providing the viewer with a serene scene of a local haunt. Tillman presents the Jordan River in a nostalgic, inspiring way akin to most previous and contemporary art photography. Swimming Hole immediately reminded me of monumental photographs by early photographers such as Edward Weston and Ansel Adams concerned with providing the spectator a grandiose view of America’s magnificent geography. As Abigail Solomon-Godeau notes in her essay, Photography After Art Photography, photographic works by artists such as Weston and Adams present “an auratic image” not invested in art’s role in institutional or representational critique, but rather, in framing “an intrinsic, aesthetic field.” Swimming Hole, while pleasant to look at, in my opinion is not an interesting or unique image. The photograph is beautiful and the use of palladium to provide the river a glowing, silver tint is aesthetically pleasing, but does not challenge the viewer in terms of “public perceptions of civil, social and aesthetic issues affecting society,” as the Salt Lake Art Center claims its exhibitions to do. The photograph quickly fades from memory as the visually striking image provides nothing critical to think about, and thus, nothing worth remembering after the exhibition.

Ansel Adams, Siesta Lake, 1958.

Edward Weston, Juniper, Tenaya Lake, 1937.

Tillman’s photograph titled Trestle Bridge (2008), while shot in similar style and produced with the same metallic sheen as Swimming Hole, is aesthetically more interesting in terms of diagonal lines captured in the scene. The photograph presents a steel, rather industrial-looking bridge stretching above the Jordan River, whose diagonal line parallels that a concrete embankment nearby, graffiti scribbled across its surface. In the background, trees and brush huddled around the water’s edge mingle with the distant Wasatch mountains and Utah skyline, creating a dichotomy between man-made materials and those of nature. Viewed in light of a possible commentary or analysis of the artificial and imposed on the native, Trestle Bridge slightly ventures into the realm of, what Solomon-Godeau describes as, photography after art photography, or photography used in postmodernist art to critique or draw attention to a system of representation. However, the work ultimately fails at escaping categorization as an auratic image, for any critical analysis gleamed from the work is ultimately the viewer’s own, the photograph produced to monumentalize the Jordan River and its beautiful attributes, rather than to make analytical commentary.

Tillman Crane, Trestle Bridge, 2008.

The distinction between avant-garde photography and art photography, states Solomon-Godeau, “lies in the former’s potential for institutional and/or representational critique, analysis, or address, and the latter’s deep-seated inability to acknowledge any need to even think about such matters.” It is clear that Tillman’s photographs of the Jordan River are concerned with the harmony and elegance of the image over stimulating analysis. While visiting the Salt Lake Art Center provided a leisurely break from the often stressful atmosphere of the winter holidays, Tillman’s works, sadly, failed to impress upon me Salt Lake City as a place producing interesting and radical art, and instead, as producing conservative, “pretty” work suitable for the Mormon viewer’s eyes.