Magazine

Charles Grogg is known internationally for his fractured photographic images. Printed in silver or platinum/palladium on handmade Japanese paper, he stitches their components together with tethers, sutures or other three-dimensional material. The resulting works address issues of growth and restraint, hesitation and power. The poet and photographic historian John Wood observes: Charles Grogg's photographs are hauntingly beautiful. And they are strange… Strings and wire are often an integral part of a Grogg photograph… wire, string, tendrils, roots, veins, all the connecting tethers of life, become his metaphor... Where, one might ask, is the beauty of a mud dauber wasp's nest, a stapled envelope, a cracked egg, or a woman with a tree's roots on her head? It is all in the making. The very fact that Grogg can make beautiful photographs of such subjects speaks to the selectivity of his eye and the power of his craft.

While growing up in northern San Diego County, Bill Dewey was aware of photography because his two grandfathers were serious amateur photographers. His maternal grandfather had studied with the photographer William Mortensen. In the 1930s, Mortensen worked as a Hollywood portrait photographer, also staging and photographing elaborate (and sometimes bizarre) tableaus using the style and techniques of the nineteenth-century Pictorialists. Dewey remembers photographs [...]