Gathered
The Collector’s Eye: Lucinda Bunnen’s Gathered
by Gregory J. Harris
Assistant Curator of Photography at High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia
The practices of photography and of collecting are impulses, compulsions rather, that go hand in hand. They are both processes of seeking out engaging, often beautiful things as a means of better knowing the world and trying to make sense of it. The legendary photographer Walker Evans was not only an endlessly inventive artist but also a voracious collector who surrounded himself with everything from old signs and picture postcards to soda can tabs. Evans admired the humble elegance of these commonplace objects and they informed how he made photographs, inspiring transformational breakthroughs in his work.
The same is true of the artist Lucinda Bunnen—it is impossible to untangle Lucinda the photographer from Lucinda the collector. Bunnen is an accomplished artist and a highly regarded collector of fine art photography. She began making pictures in the late 1960s and collecting the work of other photographers soon after. Her eye as a photographer developed simultaneously with her eye as a collector, each adding layers of depth to the other. In both her own photography and her collecting, she openly embraced innovation and evolution. Over the decades, her interests as a photographer have swung seamlessly back and forth between documentary and experimental impulses.
Bunnen possesses a boundless curiosity and a willingness to continually try new things. She is the rare artist who can find inspiration all around her. Recently, she returned to her collections as a source of inspiration. But rather than looking to the work of other photographers, she has turned her lens on the idiosyncratic objects she has gathered and lived with at her home in Atlanta through the past sixty years. Parallel to her journey in photography, Bunnen has, much like Evans, steadily built a distinctive collection of objets trouvés. These are things that, as she described them, “I have inherited, gifts I have been given, and things that I have found or that have struck my fancy at one time or another as well as things that represent my various interests at different times.”
These improvised still lifes, composed in a direct and uninflected manner on a pair of weathered drop cloths, are the culmination of years of looking intently: rainbow-colored marbles from the nineteenth century, an assemblage of splintered wood, a thoroughly rusted typewriter, numerous animals crafted from discarded metal or wood, a ship created by the artist Radcliffe Bailey, a face fashioned from wire and rags by the artist Lonnie Holley. This array of objects, bathed in a delicate natural light, communicate Bunnen’s passion for the world around her. Together, they form an autobiography of an artist who approaches the world with a sense of wonder and renders its image with grace.
The Things That Define Us
by Katherine Jentleson
Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia
Only those who have had the distinct pleasure of visiting Lucinda Bunnen in her home know the incredible experience that she has curated there. Exploding the constraints of the age-old cabinet of curiosities tradition, in which exotic treasures are classified and exhibited in drawers and vitrines, Lucinda has created a compound of curiosities. The open, airy space of her home, which could not feel farther from the bustle of twenty-first century Atlanta, is also the magical, sprawling stage for her many objects of wonder.
There Lucinda displays her own photographs as well as other museum-worthy artworks by local heroes such as Radcliffe Bailey and Lonnie Holley that are a testament to her support of Southern artists. Decades of patronage of living artists, regardless of their level of training, has certainly made Lucinda’s collection of “fine art” one of the finest in this city. But there is also the collection of ephemera, the souvenirs of travels abroad and other everyday relics that have been accumulated over a lifetime, that contribute to her visually alluring atmosphere.
Lucinda is a keeper of things, and when she is not reanimating them through the lens of her camera, as she does in this book, they perform as charms in her domestic space, covering the surfaces of tables and shelves: A bowl of seashells spotted in the sand over a lifetime of beach trips; porcelain marbles, dating from the nineteenth century; an impossibly perfect fish fossil and an equally imperfect warty gourd; tree fragments that look like animal skulls and animal skulls that look like tree fragments; children’s toys and other collectibles that have aged into curios that are both sentimental and eerily beautiful.
Today any consumer can approximate this kind of bric-a-brac aesthetic, thanks to trendy home stores like Restoration Hardware, whose décor section includes items like “weathered stone spheres,” sets of “Indonesian oyster branches,” and attractive brass trays, and petite glass cloches to display them in. There is nothing wrong with buying such things online or at the mall, but Lucinda’s compound of curiosities comes with a greater aura of authenticity, owing to the fact that each curio was “gathered” over time and through countless fateful encounters by Lucinda herself. More than mere decorations, these meaningful things have become muses for Lucinda in this rich body of work, which flies in the face of “you can’t take it with” minimalism, suggesting that we define ourselves not only by what we do, but also by what we keep.
Durham, North Carolina on the Way to META, Black Mountain, Gathered—Performing the Interior
by Susan Harbage Page
Assistant Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Gathering objects over time and space, Lucinda Bunnen has built an environment in her home that delights her eyes. For thirty years, I’ve watched her buy the best work at local auctions, and then buy the leftovers at the same auctions. The pieces left behind, the stragglers, the misunderstood. She brings them home, and with her thinking hands, places them in groups on walls, tables, and shelves, and they’re transformed into something new, something desired, something with meaning. The relational eye of Lucinda has been at work conversing with the maker of the object, and the spirit and conversation it brings into her home.
Watching her create Gathered, and taking in the luscious images, I recall all the times I have seen her pick up a seemingly uninteresting rock or necklace or button, feel the surface, shift its balance in her hand, and then place it carefully among other beloved objects to give it an aura that might otherwise have been missed.
My memories of Lucinda are bountiful . . . including meandering daily walks, where she taught me to scan the ground for rocks in the shape of a heart. These objects were invisible only until she bent down to carefully pick them up. Discovering new territories, relearning the world, she trained herself to see in a new way. These memories are a metaphor for the culmination of a life well lived.
I feel the presence of important photographers Sophie Calle and Claude Cahun in Lucinda’s work. Their work serves as a conceptual theater. Calle photographed private objects left behind in hotel rooms and constructed imaginary identities for their unknown owners in her work, The Hotel. Cahun examines her identity in the mirror and looks back at herself in an extended series of self-portraits, often with a makeshift sheet or blanket as background. Calle, Cahun, and Bunnen all create a place to ask questions about their existence, how they do or don’t fit in, a way of using photography not to violently capture something, but, instead, as a place to perform and gather something. In the creative process, first there must be boredom, then play, and then finally the creative space opens up. Kids given a private space in the garage or yard or playroom will invent a new play, a dance, or a band, and will make a stage with sheets and a clothesline and invite their loved ones to watch. In this new body of work, Lucinda gives herself permission to play and perform her interior.
