Edition Announcement #374 - Laura Bell

Ferry from Ardrossan Harbor by Laura Bell

Ferry from Ardrossan Harbor by Laura Bell
10"x8" ($20) | 14"x11" ($50) | 20"x16" ($200) | 30"x24" ($1000)

Gust of Wind by Laura Bell
10"x8" ($20) | 14"x11" ($50) | 20"x16" ($200) | 30"x24" ($1000)

Greetings, collectors. NYC feels a bit...moorish today, with its wind-whipped rain and bone-chilling dampness, which sets the stage nicely for today's pair of moody beauties by 2010 Hot Shot Laura Bell. In considering Laura's work for 20x200, Sara and I were in wholehearted agreement that just one would never do, so it's with great pleasure that I present to you Ferry from Ardrossan Harbor and Gust of Wind.

The ease with which we're able to share art and photography online is what makes 20x200 go. That people are looking at art and reading about it twice a week is essential to what we do; in many ways that habit is as important to us as the prints you choose to own. Still, there is so much joy to be found in the physical thing itself—experiencing it in the real world and living with it within your serendipitous vision.

I participated in a panel about photography and technology at AIPAD this past weekend, where (much to my chagrin!) one of my colleagues asserted that the photographic print is hurtling towards a near-at-hand extinction, and we are facing an inevitable future of images enjoyed exclusively via LCD display. Now, I might have been the biggest proponent of digital images in that room, but I certainly don't share that vision. The beauty to be found in a physical print is irreplaceable and sure to be enduring. Laura Bell's images—beautiful objects that also imbue the things in them with a lushness and dimension that make those things even more beautiful than they might be in the real world—make me ever more certain of a future that includes the enjoyment of tangible things, their surfaces, subtleties and inevitable imperfections, and what they unlock in our individual imaginations.

Ferry from Ardrossan Harbor makes me think of a A Room With a View. (Quite happily so, as I've always been a major sucker for period dramas.) I imagine some party of fancy ladies and dandified men out for a picnic at the seaside, and looking at the horizon through a gilded telescope. And yet, its resulting image is somehow not at all cheesy, as Sara and I discussed over IM this morning. Its infinite horizon is so amazingly soothing, which doesn't surprise me—ocean lover that I am—but there's something about it being neatly contained within a circle that makes its endlessness more mysterious.

Gust of Wind has a soundtrack of heaving doors and creaking wooden stairs, and of air whose particles of dust are moved about with supernatural breath. Laura's title might blame it on the wind, but in my mind, the candle's flame has been tamped by a ghostly hand. Hopefully such evocations of the imagination don't appear too far-fetched as you view these images on your computer screen, but like the Old Masters paintings that inspired Ms. Bell, these gorgeous objects are best enjoyed in the physical world.

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