DOCUMENTING ARTISTS’ WORK
WHERE FILM IMMERSES,
PHOTOGRAPHY ACCUMULATES MEANING THROUGH FRAGMENTS.
RECORDING THE FRAGMENTS OF EXISTENCE
Artists require archives.
Photographs create a visual record of how a practice evolves - how decisions are made, how attention moves, how meaning accumulates over time. They allow artists to return, reflect, and build forward with clarity - not for nostalgia, but for structure.
For others, photographic archives can be a goldmine for understanding context that involves period, style, thinking, among others.
They reveal the human behind the art - how they lived, what inspired them, and the conditions under which they worked. It helps contextualize their creations.
WHY THIS WORK MATTERS
Documentation is often the only thing curators, writers, and grant panels will ever see of an artist's work. A photograph of a studio, a process, an installation — these are not secondary materials. They are how the work travels, how it is understood by people who were not in the room, and how it is evaluated by those who decide what gets shown, collected, and written about.
For time-bound work — installations, performances, collaborative projects — archival material often comes to represent the artwork itself within museum collections. The documentation does not describe the work; it becomes it.
An artist who maintains a visual archive demonstrates seriousness about their practice — that they treat their work with respect and act responsibly toward it. What is not photographed is, in time, simply not remembered. The conditions under which the work was made, the space, the thinking, the moment — these disappear without a witness.
KENTON NELSON
Artist Kenton Nelson, 2015.
This photograph, taken through a mirror, informs his mediums of painting. He just finished a small watercolor painting and in this picture, working on acrylic paintings.
The longboard was his nephew’s, Tyler Warren, a famous surfboard shaper and designer in Orange County.
The collection of these photographs, in black and white, was made into the first documentary short film.
Kenton Nelson pausing to gather his thoughts on his painting, photographed in his studio in Pasadena, California, July 15, 2016. Kenton is a very neat painter - his studio has no paint splatters, and he always dressed well even when painting.
Kenton Nelson, in 2016. Environmental Portrait in the studio garage. On the right side of the image are his father’s items that he had kept, often becoming the objects in his paintings of idealized mundane items. The paintings around him are informing of aspects of his work: his early paintings about the houses in Pasadena, mosaic artwork from his painting, summer beach-themed painting, and a painting of the Colorado Street Bridge that he painted for the Pasadena Heritage Society to be auctioned off to support the efforts of preserving historic items. All items are as-is, nothing was staged other than the chair.
Kenton Nelson and his team in October 2016, during the installation documentation of one of his largest mosaic mural installations commemorating the history of The Pasadena Playhouse.
This 5-day installation was documented in photographs and with a final product of a short film.
The documentation process started months prior to this installation.
In 2017, Kenton started making Curations, a memorabilia box containing nostalgic items. The mock drawing and design for the previous Pasadena Playhouse Mosaic Mural was still on the wall behind him.
Kenton’s exhibition, Water, 2018.
The two-day exhibition opening was documented in photographs and as a short film.
In 2018 we collaborated to make a book called Documentary: Working On Art, which contains images of him working covering paintings, curations, and mosaic mural. This book accumulates the documentary photography that was done for the last 4 years.
The following years the documentation moved entirely in the form of short films.
OTHER SELECTED ARTIST DOCUMENTATION
RAY TURNER
Ray Turner's Population series — hundreds of oil-on-glass portrait paintings, each 12 by 12 inches — was already years in progress when this documentation was made in 2013. At this point in the work, Turner was painting figures as a way of thinking through humanity as a theme, building the series portrait by portrait across communities in the United States. These photographs were made during active studio sessions, not setups.
David Buckingham
David Buckingham works exclusively in found metal — scrap machinery, old road signs, weathered agricultural equipment sourced from the California desert. Nothing is painted. Every color and surface texture in his sculptures is original to the material as found. His studio in Downtown Los Angeles was itself part of the story: the raw material, the work in progress, and the finished pieces all occupying the same space, as if he was reworking his past into a new beautiful form.
ANTON ISMAEL
Anton Ismael is a Jakarta-based photographic artist and educator whose practice, across more than two decades, has consistently returned to questions of identity rooted in Javanese culture and landscape. He has taught photography for free for over ten years through his morning classes. These photographs were made on March 30, 2016, during the filming of a music video for Kelompok Penerbang Roket, which Anton directed — the beginning of a longer collaboration that would eventually become a documentary short film.
Every body of work has a moment when it becomes visible to the world — through an exhibition, a commission, a publication, or simply the passing of time. What exists in photographs determines how it is seen, understood, and remembered.
If you are an artist who takes your practice seriously, this work is for you.
Event-based and yearly commissioning are available.
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