Bay Window, Late Afternoon

Susanna Vance has been photographing the same five windows of the same Maine farmhouse since 1986. Bay Window, Late Afternoon is the fourth in a sequence of seven exposures made between 4:48 and 5:22 p.m. on 14 October 2019. The print is the only one Vance pulled from that negative; the remaining six were destroyed during her studio fire in February 2020. The Halden acquired the print in 2021 from the artist directly, with the help of the Acquisitions Committee.

What is most easily missed about the photograph is what is not in it. There are no figures, no objects on the sill, no animal on the floor. The room — the dining room of the house Vance and her late partner shared for thirty-one years — has been emptied for the picture, the table pushed out of frame and the chairs stacked in the hall. What remains is light. The bay window faces west across a stand of birches that, in October, have just begun to turn. The light passes through the leaves before it reaches the glass, and then through the glass before it reaches the room, and what Vance has caught is the room receiving it: a wall of plaster carrying the imprint of a tree it cannot see.

The Maine sequence

Vance began the Maine series the autumn she moved into the house, then twenty-two years old. The early photographs are unremarkable — student work, in her own description. What changes around 1994 is the discipline: a decision to photograph the same five windows once a season, in the last hour of light, on whatever day the weather makes possible. The accumulation is now a forty-year record of a building, but the photographs are not about the building. They are about how a small set of constraints, faithfully observed, can be made to hold an enormous range of feeling.

The Halden’s print is paired in the gallery with two earlier works from the same window, made in 1996 and 2007. Together they suggest Vance’s slow approach to the medium: not the decisive moment of the street photographers, but its near opposite — the long, undecisive moment of a room asked to keep still.

Technique

Vance works exclusively in black and white, on a 4×5 view camera with a single lens, and prints by hand in a darkroom she built in the farmhouse’s east bedroom. Bay Window, Late Afternoon was exposed for 1/4 second at f/16 on Kodak Tri-X, developed in HC-110 dilution B, and printed on Ilford Multigrade Fiber Warmtone, grade 3, in a 16 × 20-inch easel. The print is selenium-toned, dry-mounted to four-ply museum board, and unsigned on the front; Vance signs only the verso, in pencil, with the negative date.

— Helena Marsh, Curator of Photography