Julie Shafer Tunnel Vision
May 3rd thru May 31st, 2025
Deep in the Shadows
Isolation. There’s self-imposed isolation (solitude by choice) and isolation that is involuntary, a deprivation against one’s will. Both states of being coexist simultaneously in Julie Shafer's photography. Her work focuses on the unseen, the discarded, and the tragic loss of history and memory, primarily in areas where mining and other forms of westward expansion have exploited land and polluted resources, rendering them uninhabitable. Often these histories are suppressed and narratives unspoken because they were carried out at the expense of indigenous communities, or those deemed expendable. Consisting of landscapes in remote locations with hidden histories that have a dark, sometimes tragic past, the camera captures the subtleties that may not be immediately apparent, revealing what is not always visible when one is physically present. The choice of location stems from her research on these territories and terrains, her eventual discovery of hidden histories—of exploitation, devaluation, and erasure—of the communities of individuals whose land was taken from them, and the resulting detachment of their existence from its history.
Employing analog photographic processes, including large-scale pinhole cameras or a traditional 4x5 camera, Shafer relinquishes control over the process, allowing natural forces such as wind, light, soil, and vegetation to make their mark during the photographic exposures. This is evidenced in past work shot on locations such as Atchafalaya Bayou, Louisiana; Laramie, Wyoming; 60 miles of the Oregon Trail; a lighthouse in Cabrillo National Monument, San Diego; and California silver mines from the 1800s. The process is arduous, with her spending long, secluded hours producing the photographs, sometimes on-site in a rented U-Haul truck converted into a darkroom.
Shafer is reminiscent of a phenomenologist trying to establish primordial contact with the world and with the other, setting the past and present as a combination of two opposing points in time and as a transition from one matter into another. The body of work titled Tunnel Vision is conceived according to a complex structure that allows the photographic process to uncover clues in the landscape about what transpired in the past, now lurking within the present. In her research on abandoned mines in the Northern Mojave Desert, she read about a half-mile-long tunnel nestled between two valleys in the El Paso Mountain range. The tunnel was dug by hand over 38 years by a gold-obsessed prospector named Burro Schmidt. It was doomed to failure as no gold was ever found. As if to take this conclusion to the extreme, Shafer imagined the mountains as a gargantuan pinhole camera in combination with the tunnel as an aperture . She calculated that achieving a photographic image within a lightless mineshaft may require an exposure of up to eight months. The conterminous quest of finding gold and the perfect photographic image within a lightless mineshaft brought to mind Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Plato’s benighted cave dwellers believe they already know the essential truths — “Then the prisoners would in every way believe that the truth is nothing other than the shadows of those artifacts.”
After several rounds of location scouting, Shafer found the Burro Schmidt tunnel. It was somewhat hidden by discarded drilling equipment lying at rest at the entrance to the mineshaft, left to rust and decay rather than being moved at a high cost. A large, rust-colored metal mining funnel lay on its side, appearing as a visage between wilderness and cultivation, a monument that contains and disperses temporality in all its varieties. To Shafer, it was reminiscent of a Richard Serra sculpture. Standing in the mineshaft entrance, 4x5 pictures were taken throughout the day of the mine funnel, displaying its ever-changing shadow, thus turning it into a makeshift sundial. The photographs are presented in a grid, a format that one might compare with the photography of disappearing industrial architecture by Bernd and Hilla Becher. But the comparison ends there. Taking Shafer’s lead, there is a comparison to Serra’s sculpture Tilted Arc, a public artwork commissioned by the GSA, constructed on Federal Plaza, adjacent to the U.S. Customs Court and Federal Building, along lower Broadway in New York City. Based on the golden section and conceived specifically for the site, Tilted Arc’s imposing scale and rust-colored, ten-ton steel material were perceived as threatening to those who used the plaza. Immigrants waiting in long lines for their visas stood shivering in the cast shadow of the sculpture, sensing that if the tilted sculpture should collapse, they would be crushed to death. After public outcry and a demand to relocate the sculpture, Serra destroyed it, arguing that it was created for that site, and that site only. Historically, it is one of his most talked-about works.
Sensing the futility of the tunnel and the fact that the tunnel and mountain, as a camera might not be realized, Shafer had an epiphany. Previous to the shoot she had constructed two collapsible pinhole cameras and the discarded equipment could be repurposed as a container to hold one. The resulting photographs are actually negatives. The shadows are seen as white and invisible to the eye, allowing a cave dweller to get a glimpse of what lies outside of the cave.
- Carole Ann Klonarides