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As a contemporary artist, Jim Dine has often incorporated other people’s photography into his abstract works. But, the 68-year-old American didn’t pick up a camera himself and start shooting until he moved to Berlin in 1995--and once he did, he couldn’t stop. The result is a voluminous collection of images, ranging from early-20th-century style heliogravures to modern-day digital printings, a selection of which are on exhibition at the Maison Europeenne de la Photographic in Paris. They are among his most prized achievements. "I make photographs the way I make paintings," says Dine, "but the difference is, in photography, it’s like lighting a fire every time."
Though photography makes up a small slice of Dine’s vast oeuvre, the exhibit is a true retrospective of his career. Dine mostly photographs his own artwork or the subjects that he has portrayed in sculpture, painting and prints including Venus de Milo, ravens and owls, hearts and skulls. There are still pictures of well-used tools in his Connecticut workshop, delightful digital self-portraits and intimate portraits of his sleeping wife, the American photographer Diana Michener. Most revealing and novel are Dine’s shots of his poetry, scribbled in charcoal on walls like graffiti. To take in this show is to wander through Dine’s life: his childhood obsessions, his loves, his dreams. It is a poignant and powerful exhibit that rightly celebrates one of modern art’s most intriguing--and least hyped--talents.
When he arrived on the scene in the early 1960s, Dine was seen as a pioneer in the pop-art movement. But he didn’t last long; once pop stagnated, Dine moved on. "Pop art had 1o do with the exterior world," he says. He was more interested, he adds, in "what was going on inside me." He explored his own personality, and from there developed themes. His love for handcrafting grew into a series of artworks incorporating hammers and saws. His obsession with owls and ravens came from a dream he once had. His childhood toy Pinocchio, worn and chipped, appears in some self-portraits as a red and yellow blur flying through the air.
Dine first dabbled in photography in the late 1970s, when Polaroid invited him to try out a new large-format camera at its head-quarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He produced a series of colorful, out-of-focus self-portraits, and when he was done, he packed them away. A half dozen of these images in per feet condition--are on display in Paris for the first time. Though masterful, they feel flat when compared with his later pictures.
Dine didn’t shoot again until he went to Berlin in the mid ’90s to teach. By then he was ready to embrace photography completely. Michener was his guide: "She opened my eyes to what was possible," he says. "Her approach is so natural and classic. I listened." When it came time to print what he had photo graphed, Dine chose heliogravure, the old style of printing favored by Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Curtis and Paul Strand, which gives photographs a warm tone and an almost hand drawn loop like Dine’s etchings. He later tried out the traditional black-and-white silver-gelatin process, then digital photography and jetink printing, which he adores.
About the same time, Dine immersed himself into Jungian psychoanalysis. That, in conjunction with his new artistic tack, proved cathartic. "The access photography gives you to your subconscious is so fantastic," he says. "I’ve learned how to bring these images out like a stream of consciousness--something that’s not possible in the same way in drawing or painting because technique always gets in your way." This is evident in the way he works: when Dine shoots, he leaves things alone.
Eventually, Dine turned the camera on himself. His self-portraits are disturbingly personal; he opens himself physically and emotionally before the lens. He says such pictures are an attempt to examine himself as well as "record the march of time, what gravity does to the face in everybody. I’m a very willing subject." Indeed, Dine sees photography as the surest path to self-discovery. "I’ve always learned about myself in my art," he says. "But photography expresses me. It’s me. Me. "The Paris exhibit makes that perfectly clear.
What does the author think of Dine’s self-portraits in the late 1970s