Artist, Jan Groover: January 1978, I got a grant. I took it to the bank, cashed it, and went to buy a 4x5 and started taking pictures with the kitchen sink.
Curatorial Assistant, Samuel Allen: Jan Groover began photographing in the 1970s. She says that what interested her about photography was that everything was already there for the camera. But many of Groover’s points of reference are painters.
Jan Groover: I look at as much painting as I look at photography. Sometimes that is about color. There’s these colors that seem to be overlapping and are contained in two different kinds of shapes.
Samuel Allen: She had been interested in still life for a while, but it was really once she bought this 4x5 camera, a larger format camera, that she started working with still life in a concerted way.
She presents everyday objects—bell peppers, silverware, glasses, bowls. She’s selecting these objects for the ways in which they can be both themselves and something else. They can be a form, a line, or a color. Also, many of the objects are either transparent or reflective, and so you’re looking through things, you’re seeing objects doubled on the surface of other objects. The whole image is cultivating uncertainty.
Jan Groover: I am interested in seeing the thing. I had some wild concept that you could change space—which you can. But once I bought the view camera, everything else was just eyeballing it.
Samuel Allen: Photography is something that Groover understood as being not so much an objective medium. So what we see in a photograph like this is not the world as we see it, it’s the world as a camera sees it. Her task, as an artist, was delving into what a camera shows us.
Archival audio excerpted from Jan Groover: Tilting at Space. 1994. United States. Directed by Mark Trottenberg. Checkerboard Film Foundation