Camera Arts magazine, March-April 2004.
Interview by Kim Brady

IRENE IMFELD: BOOKS INSPIRED BY THE EARTH

“Big photographs are in style now, but there’s always a place for small-scale things,” says Irene Imfeld, a photographer and graphic artist based in Oakland, California. “I like holding an image in my hands and looking at it up close. The hand-held scale of a book invites the viewer to experience an intimate view of a picture on a page.”

Imfeld has been a graphic artist by trade, but she studied photography in college and has pursued her love of landscape and nature photography since the mid-70s. "For more than 20 years in the graphics business, I shot in my spare time and put away the film,” she said. “In 1993, I began printing some of my old materials and shooting new images.”

Her ideas are very personal and somewhat spiritual. “I’ve always been inspired by landscapes—painting and photography,” says Imfeld. “I think nature has a lot to say to us, but our society is so over saturated by popular media that it’s difficult for nature’s message to get through. The landscape has parallels to our own lives, and the more I think about it, the more I see the earth as not so different from its inhabitants. Take time to observe any volcanic landscape. Certainly it’s on a different scale, with different life processes, but earth is a living being, and it is animated from within much like we are.”

Imfeld picked up bookmaking skills while working in the publishing industry and by attending workshops, especially at San Francisco Center for the Book (SSCB.org). In 2002, she assisted Susannah Hays, an instructor at the San Francisco Art Institute, with layout and production of Hays’ own artist’s book, Between Cedar and Vine.

In 1996, I started working on Landscape Fragments (above), my first substantial book project,” Imfeld said. It was shown in 1997 at a small gallery in Oakland, as well as other local galleries. I entered it in a handmade book competition and won first prize. Since then, I’ve been shooting as much art photography as possible between business assignments, and within the last year I’ve shifted my concentration to photography.” I make my books from scratch,” Imfeld said. “The covers of Landscape Fragments are wood, cut out of hardwood and finished by a furniture maker. I simply glued a thick piece of museum board on the inside to keep the wood away from the prints.

The 24 triptych images are printed on individual pieces of paper about seven inches high and 15 inches wide. They are not bound together, but stacked between the covers in the style of a Tibetan book. The pages are Iris prints, printed at Urban Digital Color in San Francisco,” she said. “I had made a series of Polaroid image transfers and was looking for a way to reproduce them accurately. The transfer prints were on watercolor paper, which gave them a fuzzy feeling (and even left some water droplets), and I realized that if I made Iris prints on heavy watercolor paper, this would be similar to the originals.”

I’ve been making limited editions of my books, about 10 at a time,” she says. “It gives me the opportunity to show the book in different ways, and I can sell some of the photos from the book as individual prints. I always look at a group of pictures as potential elements of a book. I don’t start working on a project seriously until I can visualize the whole thing as a final work of art.”

Changing Points of View (pageis an offshoot of Landscape Fragments. “I had a lot of materials, so I used similar images in a second book,” she said. “The look of Polaroid image transfers matched the meditative intent of the first book, but for the second, I used Iris prints made from drum scans of the film (also scanned and printed at Urban Digital Color). These seven diptychs show different types of land, sequenced from dry, empty landscapes at the beginning, and adding more and more water as it progresses.

Metaphorically it reflects the stages in our lives. We start out unformed, go through rocky periods, then reach a center point. A big green tree is in the center of the book, representing the flourishing, fruitful part of our lives. Then the imagery moves through fog and a marsh—toward the sea. The last diptych is an ocean view where it’s hard to see where the ocean stops and the sky begins. I think of that as our return to nature at the end of our lives.”

Changing Points of View (above, left) is an accordion fold book with a traditional cloth-covered cover. Each diptych is a separate piece of paper, scored down the center and folded. The pages are attached to one another with thin Tyvek tape on the back, so there is very little bulging at the folds. The final spread is hinged on a half-size piece of paper glued to the back cover; the front cover and spine are not attached to the pages. When stretched out, the book is 15-feet long.

Using her new Epson 7600 printer in 2003, Imfeld completed Traveler’s Guide: Circle Route (above, right), a pocket book that folds like a map. The central image is a desert canyon under an expansive sky. Six progressive shots of the moon are subtly layered (in Photoshop) into the two center panels. The side panels (left and right) surround this scene with star trails circling the night sky. The inside book cover contains a short poem printed on mulberry paper.

Implying a longer perspective than humans are capable of understanding, this little rectangular book illustrates a circular timeline, ever turning and returning,” she said. “We are part of nature, but in our short lives we cannot know the results of our actions. It is a pleasure to employ a cultural construct, the book, and a cultural practice, photography, in the service of nature,” Imfeld said. “I hope my work provides viewers with a visual meditation about presence on the earth.”