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Zabludowicz Collection, Collecting Collections

Zabludowicz Collection, Collecting Collections

Lucky Tiger #1, 2009 Laurel Nakadate C-print and fingerprinting ink, 15.24 x 10.16 cm

A collection has the potential to create a web of interlocking stories, influences and histories through the items it contains. In the case of art, what is collected embodies more than the sum of its parts: it is a node of communication about culture, ideas and ideologies. To give structure to their undertakings collectors often give themselves guidelines, allowing collections within collections to be made and enlightening overlaps and references to be constructed. One example of a defining boundary within the Zabludowicz Collection is its focus on the photography of Gregory Crewdson – professor of photography at Yale University in the USA since 1993 – and a selection of his graduating students, such as Matt Ducklo, Katy Grannan or, more recently, Laurel Nakadate and Bradley Peters.

Crewdson is known for unsettling staged narrative photographs of suburban America. His sensuous large-scale works are uncanny psychodramas in impossibly sharp landscapes or suburban situations. In Beneath the Roses (2005–8) he again pushes the very notion of an authentic photographic moment to the limit. Every millimetre of the image is constructed. Often compared more to paintings, his use of digital and Hollywood staging technologies allows him to create pictures where nothing is left to chance, everything is flattened and in focus.

Graduating from Yale in 2001, Laurel Nakadate works both in photography and film, placing herself at the centre of the nexus of author, subject and audience. She is occupied with a critical exploration not only of photography but also of the social structures which construct Western identity. Her work is a sticky knickerbocker glory of references: race, poverty, mental health and gender are thickly layered through her irksome images. In her recent feature-length motion picture Stay the Same Never Change (2008), Nakadate directs a series of protagonists through a mundane suburban American dream. In the Lucky Tiger series (2009) she photographs herself as an all-American cheesecake teen, posing against the landscapes of rural America complete with bikini, Stetson hat, pickup truck and cowboy boots. These photos were given to men whom she had groomed via craigslist.com. They were asked to look at them with their fingers coated in fingerprinting ink. The resulting prints, unique and smeared with the marks of the men’s gaze, question photography’s very place in the media saturation of twenty-first century life.

The focus on Crewdson and students goes alongside a similar strategy with Bernt and Hiller Becher and students of the Düsseldorf school, or Timm Rautert and his students from the Leipzig Academy. By concentrating on the work of one school of photography a collection can be built to question through a series of divergent lenses the larger issues of the era. Crewdson and his students’ works contain implicit criticism and references to landscape, photojournalism and street photography using the qualities inherent in the processes they employ. They also address a multitude of notions of manipulation and authenticity, issues that other photographers from different traditions choose not to concentrate on. Therefore a collection can tell a number of histories in one place, drawing a broader image of contemporary concerns into focus over time.

Artist: Bradley Peters is a photo artist based in New Haven, Connecticut. He received a BA in Psychology and Art from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln in 2004. He received his MFA in Photography from Yale in 2008.

Artist: Gregory Crewdson is a photo artist based in New York City. He received his BA from the State University of New York at Purchase in 1985 and MFA in photography from Yale University in 1988. He has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe and his work is held by many public and private collections including the Tate, MOMA, Met and Whitney. As a teacher, Crewdson has held positions at Cooper Union and the State University of New York at Purchase, and was appointed to the Yale faculty in 1993 where he is currently professor (adjunct) of photography.

Artist: Katy Grannan is a photo artist who lives and works in San Francisco. She received her MFA from Yale University. Her work has been exhibited at the 2004 Whitney Biennial, The Guggenheim Museum, Bibao and many others.

Artist: Laurel Nakadate is a photo artist based in New York City. She received her BFA in 1998 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University and her MFA in 2001 from Yale. Her recent film ‘Stay the Same Never Change’ was premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival; she will have a solo show at the Power House Memphis in 2010.

Writer: Anita and Poju Zabludowicz founded the Zabludowicz Collection in the early 1990s to collect international emerging contemporary art, they opened their London exhibition space, 176 in 2007 with the aim to exhibit the Collection and facilitate projects with artists and curators. They are founder supporters of the Zoo Art Fair – Britain’s first art fair targeted at up-and-coming British artists and galleries and Anita is also a trustee of Camden Arts Centre and Tate Foundation.

Writer: Elizabeth Neilson is contemporary art curator. She is currently based in London as Curator and Head of Collection for 176 / Zabludowicz Collection.