AN ART HISTORY OF EPHEMERA:
GRETCHEN GARNER’S CATALOG

Photographs by Gretchen Garner
Tulip Press, Chicago, 1982

[book is out-of-print]

See the Ephemera photographs

From 1976 to 1978, my main focus as a photographer was the urban (or man-altered)  landscape, and when I gradually recognized there were certain things that attracted me again and again, I realized I was discovering a personal taxonomy of forms that spoke to and for me.  So, following Linnaeus, I classified these things, albeit whimsically.  The resulting 27 categories (there could have been more) were exhibited together as my "Catalog" and self-published in book form in 1982.  An epigraph from Linnaeus was complemented by quotes from Chuck, Berry, Wallace Stevens, and Denise Levertov, making up the entire text of the book, except for the names of the categories.

The first step of science is to know one thing from another.  This knowledge consists in their specific distinctions; but in order that it may be fixed and permanent distinct names must be given to different things and those names must be recorded and remembered.

Carolus Linneaus

Anything you want we got it right here in the U.S.A.

Chuck Berry

She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang….
                                    Then we
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Wallace Stevens

I saw Paradise in the dust of the street.

Denise Levertov

What follows is a 1979 statement written to accompany a show of the photographs:

How much of our visual life is made up or ordinary, odd, unimportant things.  And how strange and wonderful this environment really is!  I am fascinated by the unintentional man-made beauty in the world—this is not beauty, of course, in any of the conventional senses of the word.  It is instead an accidental, ephemeral beauty that offers us experiences of delight, humor and sensual gratification that we can easily overlook, on a conscious level.  I want to attend to these things.

In my Catalog I have compiled a personal collection of everyday forms, colors and visual phenomena that give me great delight.  It has been a three-year process of specimen collection, as it were, with the taxonomy—the division into categories—coming after the fact.  My working method was always to go into the world and respond to anything that excited me—then later to play with the contact prints, dividing them into groups that eventually coalesced into twenty-seven categories.  Many pictures could be cross-overs into different categories, I discovered, and many more never made it into the final project.  (Perhaps at a later date they will surface in my work—I always trust my instinct when I make an exposure, though often I don’t discover the reason until much later.)

Wallace Stevens, a great celebrator of the ordinary, said it this way:

It is there, being imperfect, and with these things
And erudite in happiness, with nothing learned,
That we are joyously ourselves and we think
Without the labor of thought, in that element,
And we feel, in a way apart, for a moment, as if
There was a bright scienza outside of ourselves,
A gaiety that is being, not merely knowing,
The will to be and to be total in belief,
Provoking a laughter, an agreement, by surprise.*

*from “Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun,” 1940

© Gretchen Garner 1979