It's Art, But Is It Photography? Robert Smithson's - Uturn.org

Deposition 1974-1976 (detail, 1982) Lew Thomas
B: Yes, wherein long contact sheet strips alternate with strips
of text, originally running across a gallery wall papered with
newspaper ads.
A: There, Thomas comes the closest, I think, to Smithson’s
photo documentation for Nonsite “Line of Wreckage,”
Bayonne, New Jersey from sixty-eight. [Stretches his back. The
diner’s seats are ergonomically designed to discourage
lingerers.]
B: I can’t help feel a connection in general sensibility between
Smithson’s combination of photomechanical illustrations and
his use of pigment, crayon, and so forth and the synthetic
photography from the early sixties. For instance, Florida photomanipulator
Robert Fichter’s similar hybridization of media.
Even the sci-fi con-tent can be found as in Astronauts and
World War I Soldiers and Negative Figure and Moonscape
both from the early seventies. Moreover, in a nineteen eightyone
series on the destruction of trees in the environs of
Tallahassee, Fichter records an entropic landscape that has
much in common with the various industrial wastelands
Smithson was so drawn to.
A: I once had an interesting E-mail exchange with Fichter. He mentioned the pervasive
influence on him, Heinecken, and others by the work of L.A. artist Wallace Berman;
especially, a multiple-image print of a hand holding a transistor radio that appeared on the
cover of Artforum. He said not many people in photographic circles were cognizant of
Smithson’s photo works.
Hugunin/23
Astronaut and World War I Soldiers
(1970) Robert Fichter