Welcome to this edition of [book spotlight]. Today, we uncover the layers of 'Fruitless | Fallen | Woven,' by Tanya Marcuse (published by Radius Books). We'd love to read your comments below about these insights and ideas behind the artist's work.

Have you ever encountered a photography series that feels more like a poetic journey through time and nature? That’s precisely what Tanya Marcuse offers with her stunning triptych, “Fruitless | Fallen | Woven.” Her work is a mesmerizing exploration of growth, decay, and the intertwining of life and death. In this casual yet enlightening interview, Tanya opens up about her artistic evolution, the personal experiences that shaped her projects, and the intricate process behind her breathtaking tableaux.

Tanya’s journey into photography began unexpectedly at Bard College at Simon's Rock, where a chance enrollment in a photography class set her on a path of creative discovery. Over the years, her work has evolved from the stark, clinical images of “Fruitless” to the rich, fantastical compositions of “Fallen” and “Woven.” 

Start with Photography: Can you recount your journey into the world of photography and how it led to the conceptualization of your ambitious projects: "Fruitless," "Fallen," and "Woven"?

I believe that photography both changed and saved my life. I began making photographs at age 17 as a student at Bard College at Simon's Rock, at a point when I had very much lost my way in terms of focus, discipline, or purpose. I had hoped to take a drawing class but it was full, so I took photography instead, feeling very disappointed. Somehow, though, at that particular moment in my life, I felt an immediate affinity with the medium. Its technical aspects somehow restrained the excess of chaotic emotion that I was wrestling with as a teenager.  

Another quality that was incredibly significant about the medium to me then, and remains so now, is that the lens is outward looking, even if you point it at yourself to make a self-portrait. While, like any medium, photography is about imagination, its starting point is the ingredients of the world. It's a kind of integration of an internal perception and experience with the external world. That reference to, reliance on, and description of the outside world was so compelling to me. 

Ever since that first semester of Intro to Photography, the medium has structured my life. 

Creative Evolution: Your work transitioned from the more clinical photographs of "Fruitless" to the fantastical realms of "Fallen" and "Woven." Can you describe this evolution in terms of your artistic process and thematic exploration?

I didn't know this would be a triptych when I began it - it evolved. Fruitless started as an experiment, while I was working on a project called Wax Bodies, traveling to Italy and Vienna to photograph eighteenth-century wax anatomical models. I like to be working and creating all the time, so these few trips a year just felt too few and far between.

The very first photograph, Fruitless No. 1, depicts a tree in winter that's still holding its fruit. I found it incredibly moving to see these apples on bare branches – it seemed like something quite magical, an image of loss and hope intertwined. It also echoed some of the complex grief I was feeling at that time, as I learned that my mom had Alzheimer's and was somehow digesting her loss, even though she was still there. This tension between absence and presence is the emotional core of Fruitless. 

I made between four and five hundred 4x5 frames of fruit trees over the next five years, often photographing the same tree in different seasons. The trees I was photographing were on land that was for sale and in danger for development, so one story the project tells is about the loss of agricultural spaces in the Hudson Valley. On another level though, there are hints of allegory in the apple trees, which recall the Biblical Tree of Good and Evil: a mode which is developed much more in Fallen and Woven.  

Toward the end of that project, there was a moment of transformation. Working on Fruitless, I had almost always been on my knees, pointing the view camera slightly upwards as a way to lower the horizon and present a single tree with portrait-like individuality. One day, instead of looking up at the trees, I started looking at the ground, at the fruit underneath the tree. I saw this memento mori made up of the decaying apples that had fallen. At that moment, I moved from landscape to still life, and from black and white to color. The horizon line drops away.  

There were other moments of accidental epiphany. I realized that instead of waiting in the orchard for a moment of really good light, I could simply collect the fallen fruit and arrange it to photograph in my own backyard. I started freezing the fruit in various stages of decay to protect them from the deer. Soon, I was adding other plant and animal materials to my growing collection, preserving them in the freezer, and using them to create tableaux which imagine the ground of Eden after Adam and Eve have been expelled and no one is there to tend the garden. Fecundity intermingled with rot and mortality – that's what Fallen is all about. 

Biblical Narratives and Nature: How do Biblical narratives, particularly the story of Eden, influence your depiction of cycles of growth, decay, and the tension between order and chaos in your work?

That's a great question! The fall from Eden is really at the heart of the triptych, which takes the imaginative leap of visualizing the Garden of Eden growing wild after its inhabitants have been exiled. The basic premise of Fallen and Woven is that death and mortality – the result of Adam and Eve's transgression – creates this fragility and ephemerality, the entanglement of cycles of growth and decay. At its core, all of the work is about that and enacts it in different ways. For example, Fallen No. 439, which is on the cover of the Fallen volume, has a snake slithering through it and a bat in the corner (surely not native to Eden), and the fallen apples are lying on a bed of new spring shoots. This juxtaposition of autumnal fruits and spring shoots wouldn't occur in nature: by staging the scene, I'm dramatizing the relationship between life and death. In the postlapsarian world, the very fragility of life creates a heightened sense of beauty. 

Artistic Inspirations: You mention medieval millefleur tapestries and Jackson Pollock’s canvases as influences. How do these references inform your compositions and the overall aesthetic of your tableaux?

The large pieces are influenced by Jackson Pollock, though he's working abstractly with paint drips and I'm working with objects and iconography in the most descriptive medium there is. The goal is to have the pieces work as all-over, almost abstract compositions from a distance, and draw the viewer in closer to find something more like still life. 

Although they seem so different, medieval millefleur tapestries, like Pollock's canvases, offer democratic description from edge to edge. A stitch is a stitch, no matter where it is in the tapestry, just as a pixel is a pixel, no matter where it is in the photographic frame. Although millefleur tapestries often have some kind of narrative focal point - a hunt, an allegorical scene, or something like that - I'm far more interested in their elaborate and playful floral backgrounds, full of little creatures, unusual flowers, and allegorical symbols. In a way, I'm experimenting with turning the medieval tapestry into something more like a Pollock in the sense that there is no compositional center or narrative drama.  

I also draw upon a wide range of visual,  literary and botanical sources. Experiences of reading and looking have transformed, inspired and pushed the work, and give me a sense of context and conversation: the physicality and drama of Artemisia Gentleschi; the psychedelics of Fred Tomaselli, the luscious and formal Golden Age still lives by Clara Peeters, the metaphysics of Hilma af Klint; the specificity of doom in Thomas Hardy…

I went to the Beinecke at Yale to study the mysterious Voynich Manuscript in person— with the intermingling of observed and fantastical. I studied Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights at the Prado; I went to Florence on an NEH summer scholars fellowship to study Dante’s Divine Comedy; 

I made iPhone notations, that I printed tiny, of passages of paintings — the grounds of the Garden of Eden, and hell, and carried the prints around in rubber banded packets. This stanza of T.S. Eliot’s East Coker (from his Four Quartets) was the impetus for Woven No 30, my largest piece. 

What is the late November doing

With the disturbance of the spring

And creatures of the summer heat,

And snowdrops writhing under feet

And hollyhocks that aim too high

Red into grey and tumble down

Late roses filled with early snow?

Dante’s wood of suicide in Canto XIII (–where the punishment for taking one’s life is to exist body-less as twisted branches that bleed, helped me understand that without human figuration I could probe matters of the soul. 

No green leaves there, but leaves of gloomy hue; 

no smooth and straight, but gnarled and twisted, 

twigs; nor was there any fruit, but poison-thorns.

Divine Comedy notes on my photographs

I took “field trips” to the American Museum of Natural History to study habitat dioramas, fathoming their contradiction of plunder and conservation, and borrowing methods. I even went on several pilgrimages to find the places represented in the New York State dioramas. “October at Stissing Mountain”.  This helped me wrestle with the translation of a place into the artifice of a new form. I wrote about this in a brief essay called “Window on Nature”. 

Photography as Exploration: Each volume of your work offers a different perspective on the natural world and human condition. What do you believe photography, as a medium, uniquely brings to this exploration?

The work is about not separating life from death, about seeing them entangled in a way that is whole. We push away illness and death as if they're aberrations, but my work aims to dramatize and make visible their embeddedness in the natural world, which our own lives are inextricably connected to. Photography has always had a relationship with death and memorialization – it records and describes something which is gone as soon as the image is created. It's very organically wedded to time - that's why it's such a powerful way to wrestle with these existential questions. 

Technical Challenges: The large-scale tableaux in "Woven" are noted for their intricate detail. Could you share some insights into the technical challenges and creative decisions involved in creating these immersive works?

In the transition to Woven, I made a decision to change aspect ratios: I'd been working with 4x5 since 1991, using my analog 4x5 view camera. I decided to move to a 1x2 aspect ratio; I was studying Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper at the time. But I didn't want the monocular emphasis that inevitably happens with a single lens, where things at the center are crisper and more fully described than things on the edge of the frame, creating a kind of hierarchy. I was looking for that tapestry-like democratic description, everything equally weighted. I had to overhaul my technical methods to achieve this, and it took a full year of trial and error. I moved from composing on the ground to a 5x10 foot wooden frame I designed to be tilted at a 45 degree angle and photographed from above on a scaffold. Instead of one single analog frame, I make between 30 and 50 digital frames that I stitch together in post production. Crucially, this means that the finished photograph doesn't depict one single vantage point, or even one single moment in time. 

In my view, technical decisions and conceptual, expressive ones can't be separated. Technical shifts bring about a perceptual and experiential shift in the work. Both in my teaching and my own work, I really strive to keep them integrated. 

Viewer Engagement: What do you hope viewers will take away from experiencing the arc of "Fruitless," "Fallen," and "Woven"? Is there a particular feeling or message you aim to evoke through the triptych?

Conceptualizing any project in book form is an act of translation. When my work is on a gallery or museum wall, that's a different experience than when you see it on the page of a book. The architectural structure of the book offers different opportunities. For example, in most books, you can't see the work all at once. You see one page at a time. I like to lean into this by thinking about the sequence, the relationship between each individual spread, the whole volume, and the triptych of three volumes. 

The first volume, Fruitless, is a black and white serial project –formally (and perhaps emotionally) restrained. The last photograph in Fruitless is the same frame as the first photograph in Fallen, yet the Fallen photograph, 45b, is in color. As you close volume I (Fruitless) and volume II (Fallen) you move into the world of fiction, allegory, color, and the artifice of staged tableaux. 

The Woven volume is also designed a little differently: since the photographs are too large and detailed to easily fit on a page, Radius Books and their brilliant publisher (and designer) David Chikey decided to have tipped in plates for every piece of the Woven series, each plate with its own full bleed detail –a mirroring of the experience of seeing the work from afar and moving in close. When you first turn the page, you see a spread which is entirely white. The viewer has to interact with it to unfold the plate and discover the overabundance and visual excess of the Woven tableaux.  

My ambitious hope is that the evolution of the triptych creates both a sense of surprise and wholeness for viewers. It begins with the singularity of individual trees, and moves into immersive, intensely detailed tableaux, pushing deeper into allegory and wonder. It also traces the arc of artistic transformation, pushing the possibilities of photographic syntax. The panels of the slipcase have images from all three volumes – the articulation of that sense of wholeness. 

Future Directions: After completing this fourteen-year project, are there new themes or concepts you are eager to explore in your future work? How do you envision your artistic practice evolving?

My projects seem to be on a four to five year cycle. I made the last piece from Woven in the spring of 2020, which I think we all remember as a pretty intense time, and my work shifted dramatically into a new place. If the passage from Fruitless to Fallen to Woven pushes toward the implausible, the work I'm doing now embraces the full blown fantastical. I can give a specific example: although there are implausible elements in Fallen and Woven, a leaf is still a leaf, a stick is a stick, a berry is a berry. In my new project, which I began in the spring of lockdown (April 2020), the objects used in the tableaux become unmoored from what they are. A dahlia petal can be a flame, an allium seed pod, painted gold, can become a celestial body. 

This new project is called Book of Miracles. It's in conversation with a manuscript from 16th century Augsburg, a compendium of phenomena that defy the laws of nature from Biblical times to the present day of the compiler. The amazing illustrations of these omens, disasters, and miracles are accompanied by journalistic captions with dates and descriptions of the events as they were 'observed.' In our time of escalating natural disasters and political instability, making work in conversation with the manuscript is a way to reckon with a sense of apocalyptic possibility.

Book of Miracles has evolved into a three part series: Kingdom, Portent, and Emblem. The pieces in Kingdom are still very large, made on the same frame I used for Woven. Portent is made up of 32x38” images of fantastical scenes staged in natural settings, and Emblem consists of smaller, almost diagrammatic iconographic compositions. In this new project I’ve also begun working with video, which has opened up thrilling new possibilities. Some images from part two, Portent, are about to be published in a One Picture Book from Nazraeli Press. 

To discover more about this intriguing body of work and how you can acquire your own copy, you can find and purchase the book here. (Radius Books, Amazon)

5 Key Takeaways

Embrace Unexpected Opportunities: Stay open to new experiences and courses outside your initial interests. Sometimes, unexpected paths can lead to profound discoveries.

Find Personal Connection: Incorporate your personal stories and emotions into your photography to create more meaningful and compelling images.

Seek Inspiration from Diverse Sources: Look beyond traditional photography for inspiration—explore art, literature, nature, and history to enrich your creative vision.

Integrate Technical and Conceptual Aspects: Understand your tools and techniques well enough to let them enhance your creative ideas. Balance technical proficiency with conceptual depth.

Persistence and Patience: Be patient with your projects, allowing time for ideas to develop fully. Dedication and persistence are key to creating impactful work.

Tanya Marcuse

Tanya Marcuse is a renowned American photographer celebrated for her profound and intricate works that explore themes of nature, mortality, and transformation. Born in 1964, Tanya’s passion for photography ignited during her studies at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, where an unplanned photography course led her to discover a lifelong calling. Over her career, Tanya has developed a unique style characterized by meticulous detail and evocative compositions. Her notable projects, including the triptych “Fruitless | Fallen | Woven,” showcase her ability to weave narrative and visual beauty into every frame. Marcuse’s work has been exhibited widely and is part of prestigious collections, reflecting her significant impact on contemporary photography. (Website, Instagram)

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