The Black List Project: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and Elvis Mitchell

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ portraits of the 25 subjects included in The Black List: Volume 1 have been seen in two cities thus far. The subjects from Volume 2 will be exhibited starting July 15th, 2009 at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. After sitting for Elvis Mitchell’s filmed interviews, each subject was invited to pose for a portrait. The results of these sessions became the visuals for The Black List book and the images for a multi-city museum tour. From the moment MFA, H director Peter Marzio and his photography curator Anne Tucker viewed Greenfield-Sanders’ Black List series portraits, they wanted to exhibit the work. The exhibition opened in Houston last August and moved on November 20th, 2008 to The Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York.

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders shoots on a large-format 8 x 10 Deardorff view camera. His method and setup are simple but the results, enormously powerful.He uses a single, hi-powered light source, a plain paper backdrop and color film. His typical sessions can be as short as a few minutes and are almost never longer than a half hour. He tends to shoot relatively few frames of film, making each exposure count. About the look of Greenfield-Sanders portraits, the legendary U.S. poet-laureate Mark Strand once wrote, “It’s as if they were caught between realism and glamour, between the brute fact of their features and the elusive aura of their fame. The more one looks, the more complex the photos become.” The images for Volume 1 were printed on Epson paper, 58 x 44 inches in size. California based, Nash Editions, made the prints and New York based, Gabe Greenberg Editions, created the gigantic digital scans. Volume 2 was scanned and printed by Primary Photographic in New York. In addition to the portraits, museum visitors will be able to see on flat-panel video screens, selections from The Black List film.