Photographer Karen Hirshan Finds Gold in Turn-of-the-Century Orotone Print Process

Los Angeles photographer Karen Hirshan has always trained her camera on the natural elements that survive in our concrete urban surroundings. Until this year, she chose to capture images of nature in precise, crisp Cibachrome color prints.

But she became “stifled by the perfection of the Cibachrome prints,” she said. “Photography tends to be mechanical and technical. I wanted to get more involved in the darkroom, to use my hands more and feel like I was creating my work.”

Toward that end, last December she began researching turn-of-the-century photography. She was particularly interested in prints known as orotones. Edward Curtis, eminent chronicler of the lives of North American Indians, was one of the few photographers to work in this medium, which involves printing on glass plates backed with gold pigment.

“I thought his orotones were beautiful, and I wanted to learn more about the process,” said Hirshan, 28. “No one knew anything. The more no one knew, the more I wanted to find out about it.”

Given her independent spirit, and a willingness to experiment and come up with her own methods, Hirshan has created about 40 one-of-a-kind orotones during the year. Almost 30 of them are on view in her first show of this work at Turner/Krull Gallery.

“She’s revitalized an old technique for the purposes of nostalgia, and yet to make a contemporary statement,” said Craig Krull, the gallery director. “She’s made it new. I’m fascinated by people who expand the boundaries of the photographic medium. She’s motivated by a theme--the environment--which is on everyone’s mind. She’s made the environmental issue personal, but very universal.”

A luminous quality emanates from these gold-toned glass prints made from black-and-white film. They include “Vine of Pods,” “Pine Cone” and “Bowl of Lemons.” There are equally radiant images of a pitcher, a vessel and a self-portrait. Hirshan said that as the light changes throughout the day, orotones blend and change with their environment.

“It feels like you can look through them, and you want to see more, but you can’t,” she said. “They are limited, which is also true of nature.”

Whether an image of a single leaf, chopped wood or an oak tree, her orotones are small to “say something about the containment of nature in this city,” Hirshan said.

All of them have been framed with delicate antique wood frames, some of which she refinished herself. Beautiful in themselves, they also serve to intensify the ethereal quality of the images.

“I love antiques and old things that capture a time-gone-by feeling,” she said. “I was thinking of creating images of that time, yet these images are timeless.”

Although some of the orotones are landscape scenes--such as “Fog on a Mountain, Yosemite,” and “Rocks in Water, Sedona”--most are of things found outdoors that Hirshan brought home and photographed in her studio.

“I work better in the studio where I have control of everything,” she said.

The orotone printing process is laborious. It can take all day to make just five glass prints, and even then, they may not come out. In some instances, she has worked on a single image for months.

“It’s hard to work with the emulsion. It can get bubbles in it which can turn into black spots,” she said. “But I enjoy the darkroom. Especially with this work, it’s part of the creation. The fragility of the process reinforces the fragility of nature.

“I will always work with nature. I feel really connected to it. As an artist you always strive to make something that nobody else has done or seen. I haven’t seen anything like this before. I’m taking the process one step further.”

“Karen Hirshan: Orotones” is open from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturdays through Nov. 14 at Turner/Krull Gallery, 9006 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles. Call (310) 271-1536.

ART SPEAKS: The Directors Guild of America opened its spacious lobby to art exhibitions about three years ago. One can view an art show before a movie screening, or come by during the day just to look at it. The lobby is open to the public.

With its expansive walls and high ceilings, it can accommodate large artworks that would be difficult to fully appreciate in smaller spaces. The guild’s current show, “Art Speaks for Itself IV,” presents immense paintings that nearly vibrate off the walls.

Curator Jeff Phillips has brought together the work of four artists who share affinities for not only big, but bold images, whether figurative or abstract.

Len Steckler’s “Marginal People” series focuses on homeless people and their way of life. The 4 1/2-foot-square acrylic paintings grew from his experience working with homeless men and women in Santa Monica. He saw a sense of holiness in their tragic faces, and one finds halos on the subjects of several of his paintings.

Most of Danuta Rothschild’s acrylic paintings, some of them as big as 8 feet square, depict displaced people of today and yesterday. “It Never Happened,” with its portrait of an old Jewish man standing on an empty street, holding books, does not let viewers deny the Holocaust in Europe during World War II.

“Silence I” shows children behind barbed wire being observed by other children. This could be a World War II-era image, but it could just as easily reflect a situation today in what was Yugoslavia. Rothschild’s three “Storm of Madness” paintings comment on the Gulf War.

Dong Kim’s colorful oil paintings are not as large, and their content is more personal. Interestingly skewed perspectives dominate the moody rooms of “The Painter,” “The Composer” and someone “Just Thinking,” creating a vicarious sense of tension.

Jessica Rice has obviously been inspired by the early 20th-Century Cubists and Russian Constructivists. Her six large, colorful oil paintings take from those schools of thought to present compelling scenes of everything from a village church and people on summer vacation to a joyful Mexican landscape.

“Art Speaks for Itself IV” is open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily through Nov . 2 at the Directors Guild of America, 7920 Sunset Blvd . , Los Angeles. Call (818) 505-8723.

OUTSIDERS: To coincide with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s exhibition “Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art,” Heritage Gallery is presenting about 40 naive and folk works by outsiders from the Sidney Janis Family Collection.

Sidney Janis was a major art dealer in New York who collected the work of unknown, untrained artists. In 1939, he organized “Contemporary Unknown American Painters,” a show of work by 16 new self-taught artists, at the Museum of Modern Art. Among them was Anna (Mother) Moses, later to be known as Grandma Moses.

In 1942, Janis wrote a book called “They Taught Themselves,” profiling 30 artists. Paintings by some of these artists are in the Heritage Gallery show.

Many of the outsider artists represented in the LACMA exhibition were confined to mental institutions. Unlike them, the painters in this show were ordinary people from all walks of life.

“These people never took art classes. They just felt they had to paint,” said Heritage Gallery director Ben Horowitz. “They painted for themselves and their friends. They never sought to show or sell their art.”

Paintings range from the amusing “Tom Mix” by J.J. Froese to the charming depiction of the “Triboro Bridge” (1940) by Isreal Litwak and the delicate “Talisman Roses” by Ella Southworth.

“Outsider Art--Naive and Folk Works from the Sidney Janis Family Collection” is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays through Nov . 28 at Heritage Gallery, 718 N. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles. Call (310) 652-7738.