WILMINGTON, DE.- The Delaware Art Museum presents Nature Morte: Platinum Prints by Bruce Katsiff, on view October 4, 2014 – January 25, 2015. For more than 30 years, photographer Bruce Katsiff has worked on the series entitled Nature Morte. He collects the remains of birds and mammals—skulls, skeletons, bones, and feathers—and arranges them with other objects in his studio. His orderly compositions, evoking Renaissance cabinets of curiosities, are captured with a large-format view camera and printed in platinum and palladium.
The 29 photographs on view in Nature Morte explore the artist’s meditations on mortality, geometry, and the history and practice of photography. Katsiff’s project began in 1982 while walking through the woods near his former home in Lumberville, Pennsylvania. The photographer spotted a deer carcass decaying—“melting into the earth, going back from where it came,” as the artist describes it. Intent on recording it, he brought his 4-by-5-inch view camera outside and photographed the animal where it lay. Intrigued by his encounter, he began to photograph similar subjects, eventually moving on to construct elaborate tableaux of birds and bones.
To create these haunting images, Katsiff uses platinum/palladium printing, a process he adopted specifically for this series. An expensive and difficult technique, platinum printing reached the height of its popularity around the turn of the 20th century when it was the preferred medium for Pictorialists and artistic portrait photographers. These photographers produced hazy, painterly prints, but Katsiff uses the process to capture extraordinary detail as well as atmosphere. Today photographers must hand coat paper with light sensitive chemicals to make their own platinum/palladium prints. The process can only be done as a contact print requiring a negative the same size as the final print.
The platinum process lends an antique look to these photographs, imbuing them with an instant poignancy that complements the subject. Nature morte, which translates literally to “dead life,” is the French term for still life, and, like historical still life paintings, Katsiff's photographs point to the fleeting nature of life. They are memento mori, reminders of the inevitability of death.
Former Director and CEO of the James A. Michener Art Museum (1991–2012) and Professor and Chair of the Art and Music Division at Bucks County Community College, Katsiff has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions in Pennsylvania and New York.
Katisff graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1968 and received a masters degree from Pratt Institute in 1972. Committed to his life as an artist, Katsiff persisted in making photographs during decades in which he fostered innovations in education and museums. Beginning in 1969, he was professor of fine arts at Bucks County Community College, where he built a nationally recognized photography program, hiring an impressive and dynamic roster of teachers, including five Guggenheim Fellowship recipients.
