INSTALLATIONS and SELF-PORTRAITS
Anne Arden McDonald

Hardbound, 12" x 13.25", 100 pages
40 black-and-white duotone illustrations
2004, Alchemy Press
Essays by Leslie Findlen and Wanda Strukus

"Anne Arden McDonald constructs and photographs the unknown. For the briefest instant, the subject of the photograph lived and breathed and experienced its most critical moment, to be recorded by McDonald's camera. If all photography involves some form of manipulation, McDonald manipulates the world outside, rather than the film. In doing so, she creates an alternate reality for the spectator, asking us to alter our view, and to enter into the intimate life of the image, finding it and calling it by name. We become witnesses to the alternate reality, standing before her photographs and testifying to their truth. We are the scientists, fact-finders, anthropologists, and weavers of legends, investigating the image and reconstructing the process, searching for the evidence that will tell us how the figure arrived in this location and what will happen next.

Anne Arden McDonald's exploration of the unknown allows her images to be classified in many ways: as surreal, as fantasy, as self-portraiture; but her work is perhaps closest in spirit to that of the Victorian travel photographers who tagged along on geological survey expeditions, and at the risk of their lives and their equipment, photographed the world out there, bringing home to the eyes of a stationary and less adventuresome population images of beauty and grandeur, of the bizarre, the unbelievable, and the magnificent." — by Wanda Strukus.

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