Ciurej & Lochman

Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman have developed a range of photographic projects together over many decades, approaching collaboration as a form of conversation. Informing their various series are interests in psychological landscapes and the domestic world. For their Still Moving, Moving Still series, Ciurej and Lochman worked with the Rod Slemmons Camera Archive and the Chicago Cluster Project to make contemporary experiments with historical cameras. Using an 1893 Kodak BullsEye #2 Camera, with modern retrofitting and the use of contemporary film, the artists created multiple images of the Milwaukee River using overlapping exposures.

The Milwaukee River is well known for its historical importance for hundreds of years as a life-sustaining waterway for the Indigenous peoples of the United States and Canada. However, during the last two centuries, the river has been over-used for tourism and economic development. Embracing the quirks of a camera made in the 1800s, Ciurej and Lochman re-photographed the negatives they produced with an iPhone in panorama mode. This digital intervention allowed for a visual quality that imitates the fragmented human experience of observation as well as the precarity of natural resources.

Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman began collaborating in 1978 while they were students at the Institute of Design in Chicago. Much of their work has involved creating visual narratives around gender and subjects such as aging or rites of passage. Their work is held in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago History Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among many others.

Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman (American, b. 1956; b.1952)
River 1, 2021
Archival Inkjet Print
7 x 26 ½ inch image on 16 x 31 inch paper
Signed edition of 30