Photography typically tells a story or records an event. For Mary Miss, it does both. Her photodrawings, as she calls them, not only document her indoor and outdoor installations, but also give viewers a sense of the architectural character of her constructions. “I’m seeking to create situations emphasizing a site’s history, its ecology, or aspects of the environment that have gone unnoticed,” she explains.
Many of her earliest installations were influenced by various types of industrial architecture. Miss, like other artists of the 1970s generation—Alice Aycock, Alice Adams, and Jackie Ferrara—saw beyond the simple geometry of Minimalism or the formalism of David Smith and pursued other forms of expression in her work, searching for content related to concept and style. For this group of young artists, architecture was a great source of inspiration. Whether classical or modern, Western or Eastern, architecture provided all the necessary lessons for integrating a large built structure into the landscape. As Miss began to work on outdoor commissions, she became proficient in incorporating architectonic elements and references into specific landscape sites. Scale was crucial to these projects because the viewer could be engaged directly—not just as a passive observer, but as an active participant, physically entering the works, climbing a tower, or entering a tunnel.
One of Miss’s photographs shows Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys (1977–78), her widely acclaimed intervention on the grounds of the Nassau County Museum of Art in which various components offered visitors unique experiences of the tranquil Long Island location. This multi-part, temporary work featured constructions both above and below ground, including three tower-like structures, two semi-circular mounds, and an underground courtyard, all built using vernacular construction techniques and materials. In “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” critic Rosalind Krauss described the courtyard of Miss’s project: “The work itself is thus entirely below grade: half atrium, half tunnel, the boundary between outside and in, a delicate structure of wooden posts and beams.” The photographs illustrate just that about the work. For Miss, photography’s dual functions are key to studying her sculpture while also serving as an important tool to educate and inform audiences, be they curators or clients. As she writes on her website, “the work crosses boundaries between landscape architecture, architecture, and urban design…my vision favors site-specificity and human perception over traditional concerns of the public monument.”
Miss continued to explore large outdoor installations in works such as Staged Gates (1979) on a forested hillside in Dayton, Ohio, and Veiled Landscape (1979), commissioned for the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid, New York. Because these projects, like Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys, were temporary in nature, documentation was important. Her creative solution was to combine studio drawings with black and white photographs of each project. The drawing portion contains renderings of imagined elements; the collaged photograph or photographs document the realized version. These hybrid works remain an important record for many of the temporary installations commissioned in the early days of Miss’s career. Together, they represent the ongoing evolution of her ideas about sculpture and a continuous exploration of varied landscapes, both rural and urban, invested with her structural elements.
Later, the technique of combining drawing with photographs took on a more dynamic form with the photodrawings. The photodrawing is a collage made up of many individual photographs cut and arranged to present the character of a structure or location that caught her attention. Miss applies this term to her multi-perspective photomontages of sites and structures, which employ several concepts from her three-dimensional work. Quite often, they focus on specific aspects of secondary architectural infrastructure, at times isolating those elements from their surrounding environments and adding additional emphasis through black and white imagery. Most importantly, the photodrawings portray the temporal experience of place, depicting the unfolding process of looking at and walking around a site through a composite image. In this way, they resemble the linear nature of film more closely than a photograph, their nuances revealed as the viewer takes time to examine them, and they might be considered as proxies for the full physical experience of a Miss installation, which means entering the physical presence of her invented space.
The word “drawing” is used to describe the process of constructing new images through these collages, which in turn have often served as preparatory “sketches” for many of Miss’s built projects. The multiple layers of carefully cut and pasted photographs echo Miss’s interest in physical, archaeological layers, which she often reveals or implies in her built installations. Following the same process across media invokes personal associations with the depicted sites, for the viewer as well as the artist.
The use of photography was a way to study and document sources for her future works. Over the years, travels to Egypt, Italy, Hungary, and Taiwan allowed her to explore the architecture and industrial design of other cultures and other cities. Her studio has an abundance of collected images from Prague, Taipei, Seattle, and, of course, her home base in New York City.
Miss’s engagement with a project can take many years to complete because of the complexity involved in each site. From initial research through conceptual development and eventual completion, there is endless evaluation and reconsideration. Three well-known examples of these multi-year programs include South Cove (Battery Park, 1984-87); Greenwood Pond: Double Site (Des Moines Art Center, Iowa, 1986–96); and The Passage, Staten Island Memorial Green (New York, 2013–16). Through her vision, each locale becomes a unique place, redesigned and reshaped by the artist. For this reason, the photodrawings are essential windows into her work. Like a sketchbook, the photodrawing is there to remind and articulate, as well as document—a visual recollection, elegant in its simplicity, of the various sources that become the basis for new ideas eventually incorporated into her work.
In the digital age, perhaps all that has now changed. The black and white photograph is almost a thing of the past. With a mobile phone, the process of documentation is done in an instant. A collection of visual resources, still photographs or videos made by walking across a site, can sit in the palm of your hand for ages. Uploaded, this new documentation becomes visible to the world. Because of this great change in technology, the photodrawings become even more significant, and not only because they predate the digital revolution—these collages reveal the creative process at work, unfolding in relation to site, which lies at the heart of Miss’s practice. Throughout her career, Miss has seen sculpture beyond the pedestal. For her, it is a collaboration that achieves a “place” developed and shaped by her vision in dialogue with the communities in which she works. The photodrawings allow us to enter that space.
