College of DuPageBeyond the EdgesJoseph D Jachna Photographs 1958-2010

www.cod.edu/gallery(630) 942-2321

Gahlberg GalleryCollege of DuPage425 Fawell Blvd.Glen Ellyn, IL 60137-6599

Mississippi Mud, 1958 Slough Gundy Rocks, (cut-up), 1967

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St. Mary’s Lake, IN, (overflow), 1965 Edge of Wolf River near Keshena Falls, WI, 1965

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“Spook” Wolf River, WI, 1964 Wolf River, WI, 1965

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Door County, WI, (barn foundation), 1970

Door County, WI, (with line), 1971 Chambers Lake, CO, campground, 1975

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Colorado Sky #2, 1975

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Colorado Sky #1, 1975

Snow Angel #7, 1976

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Snow Angel #1, 1976

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Jody, Reservation River, MN, 1975/82

Left: Tim in our tent in Iceland, 1976/82

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Ginny in our Winter, WI house, 1981/82 Heidi on a Lake Superior Beach, 1981/82

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Iceland South Coast, 1976

Opposite page: Thingvellir, Iceland, 1976

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Pilsen, Chicago, (balloon), 1984

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Wisconsin, (wallpaper Toss-Up), 1978

Sycamore Leaf, LBL, Kentucky, 2009

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Branch by Sugar Creek, 1985

Earth Mimics Sky near The Pas, MB, 2008

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“Castle”, Churchill, MB, 2010

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My Workplace, northern WI, 1965 My Workplace, Churchill, MB, 2010

Ginny photographing, WI, 1974

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Photographer Minor White, the revered editor ofAperture, devoted the entire spring 1961 issue towork by five ID students, including Jachna. Whitenoted in his introduction that studying “cameravision into graduate levels takes courage becauseso doing means going against the commonplacepractice of turning ‘professional’ at the firstadequate print from the drugstore.”

In addition to Jachna, Siskind selected KenJosephson, Ray Metzker, Joseph Sterling andCharles Swedlund for Aperture, placing the groupin the royal court of great photographers themagazine featured. His four colleagues eachwrote an essay to accompany their portfolios. But Siskind — Jachna’s graduate adviser — pulledtogether excerpts of Jachna’s journal entries torun with his photos. “S. [a graphic designer andclient] bought me a book of haiku in which I founda poem. It read: Clear Colored Stones/Are VibratingIn/The Brook Bed…Or The Water is. Soseki,”Jachna wrote in one telling published entry.

That journey of discovery with altered perspectivesruns from Jachna’s thesis photographs of waterthrough current work, where he finds the formsof animals and mythological beasts suggested byveins of bedrock that pierce through the ruggedtundra of Churchill, Canada. Chance and time spinwater into cinematic instants in Jachna’s images.Chance and time, reset to a lumbering geologicpace, are at work in his Churchill landscapes andother current work, a grand synthesis of seeing— and living in wonder of a world seen for how it would look photographed.

After completing graduate studies, Jachna taughtat ID for the next eight years. Jachna and artistVirginia Kemper, also an ID graduate, had marriedby then. And he continually pursued his

photography, just as Callahan and Siskind hadalways done. He slowed down the shutter speedto one second for another series of water photos,brushing time and motion into ethereal strands of light or cosmic bursts at the Wolf River inWisconsin or Bond Falls in Michigan’s UpperPeninsula. “Charged time — the stillness of adynamic moving subject in the frozen moment,”he called it. But something as simple as a coalpile in Chicago, where the snowline met the dirt,could emblaze a powerful abstraction at placesthat few people stop to look.

In 1969, Jachna’s life touched a turning point. He began a 32-year career on the faculty of theSchool of Art and Design at the University ofIllinois at Chicago but fortuitously taught aworkshop in Door County the summer before he started.

“The students were all fired up and went off to take photographs and, there I was, standing in the road, not knowing what I wanted to do,” he said. Luckily, he had brought a 17 mm Pentaxfisheye lens with him and tried it out. The ultra-wide-angle perspective brought his fingers andhis physical presence into the viewfinder for thefirst time. He stood at an artistic precipice ofwhether to leave them in the frame or pull back. “I decided to put them in, maybe the mostimportant gesture of my photographic career,” he noted later.

The next summer, he introduced mirrors andlenses into the black and white images. Themirrors brought clouds and sky to the palm of hishand, opening a portal into the earth in the images.The outstretched fingers, both holding the mirrorand reflected in it, create a Stonehenge of actualplaces tapping into mysteries beyond them.

Distinctive shadows inhabit this surreal world of 1970. Jachna photographed his own shadowagainst a jagged rock casting its own shadow ofan archetypal shape. The shape resembles theprofile view of a prehistoric thatched hut with a slanting roof or modern bungalows throwingsilhouettes along a thousand city streets in theafternoon. The shape becomes almost apictograph, a universal symbol of belonging thatappears like a mantra in Jachna’s work.

Jachna’s family also entered the picture as hecharted his rendition of vacation photographstaken in Colorado, the North Woods and otherspots where the family camped. “You have to setup the tent, make the beds, clean the pots everyday when you camp. But over the summer I got a lot of work done,” Jachna said.

Jachna took shots of feet — Ginny’s and thosebelonging to their three children, Tim, Heidi andJody — for one humorous series, collaging eachimage with landscapes of the locations the feetgrounded. He customized a wide-angle lens totake photos such as a 1975 vignette of Jody (nowan orthopedic surgeon who was 6 years old atthe time). The photograph leaves us deep in theprimeval forest, where we come face to face withan elfin child who all but blends into the splashesof light and shadow.

The mirror strips resurfaced in Iceland, whereJachna traveled and photographed on a grantfrom the National Endowment for the Arts in1976. Here he softened his edge for a volatilefusion of earth and sky. In one shot, a romanticmirror-image of sky and clouds cuts an alternativeroad through a hauntingly isolated highway tonowhere. The mirrored sky seems to piercethrough a glacier in another.

Beyond the Edges

Joseph Jachna, a South Side kid with a knack for electronics and photography, found Chicago’sInstitute of Design in the yellow pages andenrolled at the world-famous school only becausehe could reach it on the streetcar line near hishome. He’d never heard of Harry Callahan orAaron Siskind, two pioneers kindling a high-voltage Chicago school of photography at ID.Jachna just wanted to pursue a trade he liked.

Instead, he mastered the art of visualizing theinner mystery and magic of nature. Film, paper,shutter speeds, lenses and, later, flash withcolored gels became tools he wielded to createglimpses into a parallel universe at the edge ofthe natural world we all recognize. Once we reachthat edge, Jachna’s photographic poetry of lightand shadow, time and motion ushers us into amystical realm beyond it.

But it didn’t start out that way.

Jachna, oldest child of a steelworker, arrived onSept. 12, 1935. His parents, Joseph and EstelleJachna, lived in Chicago’s West Pullmanneighborhood of small, tidy houses with abackdrop of the mills and factory assembly lines,but young Joe could bike to the nearby forestpreserve. He attended Assumption of the BlessedVirgin Mary elementary school and then studiedelectronics at Chicago Vocational High School. He planned to follow in his Uncle Eddie Jachna’sfootsteps, repairing radios and televisions. Then,senior year, he took a part-time job at DerwinStudio working for Felix Derwinski and decided to study photography. He had a $500 newspapercarrier’s scholarship and tuition at ID totaled $350a semester. Everything lined up perfectly for his

chosen trade — except that the photographydepartment at ID was trailblazing far beyondcommercial work, pushing at the creativeboundaries of the medium as Jachna stepped offthe streetcar and into his first classes in 1953.

Visionary artist and educator László Moholy-Nagyfounded ID when he transplanted the BauhausSchool from Germany to Chicago in the 1930s.The Bauhaus ideal of melding art and the industrialage through innovative design animated the NewBauhaus School when it opened here in 1937. The name of the school changed along the way.By the time Jachna started there, ID was part ofthe Illinois Institute of Technology and occupied a gray-stoned citadel at 632 N. Dearborn Street.Moholy had died by then and Jachna’s role modelsbecame the reserved, soft-spoken Callahan andthe witty Siskind. While their personalities poseda study in contrasts, their passion for photographycoincided completely.

Callahan used dramatic light and shadow tospotlight people in everyday scenes in Chicago,revealing the city as a stage set for life. Siskind’shead-on close-ups of paint drippings and peelingposters turned cultural decay into arrestingabstraction during his ID years.

Jachna learned practical skills such as studiolighting and composition his first year, but ID’sfocus on creative photography and “seeing” as an artist overwhelmed him. “My head wasspinning. I really didn’t understand it all,” he said.“The way they talked — artists talk differentlythan other people. So I quit and worked for Fordat a big assembly plant” and then repaired camerasfor Eastman Kodak. “And during that year, ofcourse, I got the itch to get back and I didn’t quitschool again until I retired from teaching.”

He began experimenting and exploring and, inone playful series, photographed the entirealphabet by picking each letter out of the urbankaleidoscope right near his home. He found A in a sawhorse, B in a pattern of roots and continuedright on through Z, embedded in his family’s back fence.

With every roll of film Jachna shot, he moved onestep closer to capturing “the inner world of ourminds encountering the outer world.” He foundclear expressions for this yin yang experience in nature. Water became both a subject and amedium for other forces in the first large-scaleseries of photographs he pursued from 1958 to1961 as his graduate thesis. From the start, thewater photographs he made ushered him into a lifelong odyssey of using the camera to solidifyillusions and to explore the transformative powerof time and motion captured in a still frame.

“Water — in nature it is the link between the realand the unreal. It’s a tease — it holds secrets,”Jachna wrote in a journal he started keepingabout his work. “After making quite a few shotsthe thought of making poetry came to me. I feltas though I were making one big poem, a poemthat was continuous.”

Ripples on the water interlaced skeins of light,reflections of the sky and the breath of the winds in photographs taken at places such as thePorcupine Mountains bordering Lake Superior in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Potent patternsemerged, taking forms such as open handsreaching out at us from the depths. The edges of light and shadow on water, the edges of aphotograph and the subconscious edges beyondreality beckon from these images to places ofutter beauty and eerie menace.

Gahlberg GalleryBeyond the Edges: Joseph D Jachna Photographs 1958-2010Thursday, Oct. 13 to Saturday, Nov. 26, 2011

The Gahlberg Gallery/McAninch Arts Center would like to thank Joseph Jachna for his countless hoursin pulling together the exhibition catalog. We would also like to thank Abigail Foerstner and StephenDaiter Gallery in Chicago for their generous contributions to this publication and exhibition, and VirginiaJachna for her behind-the-scenes input throughout this project. Thank you!

Barbara WiesenDirector and CuratorGahlberg Gallery

This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Cover: Rock near Hudson Bay, Churchill, MB, 2010

Back Cover: Dowdy Lake, CO, 1974

MAC-11-6690(9/11)1M

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Collages, cut-outs within prints, lightscapes ofbuildings as urban sculptures — Jachna took his edges and his visual poetry from Iceland to urban canyons to remote Wisconsin winters in the next few years. Even a simple snowdrift piled on a Wisconsin garage reveals the uncannyprofile of a woman’s face and neck in a transientshadow, truly a breathtaking gift of chance.

He, Ginny and the children designed and builtwith their own hands a cabin in Winter, WI,working piecemeal across 1980 and 1981.Carpenters tackled the roof and the family moved into the finished home for a year so thatJachna could embed his photography in a placehe had only visited, a retreat supported by aGuggenheim Fellowship. His work includeddozens of Kodachrome slides of the ebb and flowof the ice on Lake Winter as spring loosenedwinter’s hold. Color had given him a new way of seeing that he mastered in 1972 so that he could introduce a color photography class at UIC.He worked sporadically in color but carried aCanon or Rolleiflex loaded with black and whitefilm even after he switched to a digital camera for color. He committed to color and the digitaldarkroom in 2002 and never looked back.

“It’s harder to use color in a way,” Jachna said.“You want to get to the point and get poetic.Black and white gives you a leg up on that.Everyone sees everything in color all the time.”

His solutions once again offer viewers a freshgaze, made possible by exploiting theunconventional possibilities of materials andtools, such as attaching colored gels to his flash.The red gel torches foregrounds in a blaze ofpinks and vermilions while backgrounds, out ofrange of the flash, look perfectly normal.

Red tree trunks or a dead bird on the sands of Lake Superior resonate that familiar duo ofmagic and menace, majesty and a Sci Fi Channelquality of a monster stalking into the scene with a ray gun.

In an ongoing series, Jachna combines color and a fisheye lens to isolate brown and curlingsycamore leaves that hover like bats or unleash a chorus of dancing spirits. Photoshop gives him inventive approaches for digital collaging with other work. Now he can “engrave” a pearl-like pattern of weeds over a landscape or wrap a forest in vibrant jets and ribbons of light.

But the cosmos of images to be found a shortwalk from a single place continues to inspire him. A trip to the Hudson Bay port of Churchill in Manitoba, Canada, in 1993 unveiled a frontierwhere Jachna will return for a fourth time inAugust 2012. Polar bears migrating by thehundreds to their winter hunting grounds attractmost of the visitors to the town.

Jachna, though, is on the trail of newphotographs in a place where nature sculpts the bedrock and paints them in a spotted skin of orange, pale green and black lichens. With a 15mm Canon fisheye lens curving the horizon,some of the Churchill landscapes resemblesatellite views of the earth transmitted from 400miles above, but the rocks themselves unleashotherworldly creatures through themetamorphosis of eye and lens.

Images reveal a cyclorama filled with a stonemenagerie of dragons and dinosaurs, butterfliesand fish — not to mention a fertility goddess ortwo. In these stage sets of seeing and being,Jachna takes rest — for a few shots. And then

he walks on, ever fascinated by the “infiniteways” light and patterns take form in his work.

– Abigail Foerstner

Abigail Foerstner teaches health, science and environmental journalism at NorthwesternUniversity’s Medill School of Journalism, Media,Integrated Marketing Communications. She’swritten hundreds of articles on photography and the arts for the Chicago Tribune and otherpublications after years of covering science andthe environment for suburban sections of the Trib. Her books include James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles; Picturing Utopia: BerthaShambaugh and the Amana Photographers; andessays for Barbara Crane: Challenging Vision and Stephen Deutch, Photographer: From Paris to Chicago.