Portrait of an Artist: Deborah Bright

Deborah Bright is a professor of both  photography and history of art and visual culture at the Rhode Island School of Design, but this semester she joins the Harvard community as a visiting professor in the department of Visual and Environmental Studies. A critic, writer, and photographer, Bright has combined her liberal arts education with an interest in history to examine topics that range from queer sexualities to the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. This Thursday at 6 p.m. in the Carpenter Center, she will be giving a talk centered on selections from her latest photographic exhibition, “Destruction Layer.”

The Harvard Crimson: Did you always study photography?

Deborah Bright: I actually first studied and got my [Master of Fine Arts] in painting. However, it was the mid-1970s, and painting was in crisis at that time because it sort of reached the end of what I would call “high formalism” as the dominant aesthetic. That’s what I had been trained in, but I had always found it very unsatisfactory because it completely avoided issues of content in the work. It was all about the formal structure, how it was put together. It being the ’70s with the culmination of the social change movements and the anti-Vietnam political upheaval, I was very frustrated as a painter that we weren’t dealing with issues of the world that we live in. It was very ivory-tower, very remote.

THC: So what eventually led you to photography?

DB: While I was in graduate school, I helped one of the professors mount an exhibition of Walker Evans’ s photographs from the Library of Congress. Getting involved with Evans’s work was really key … for me because he was a photographer who combined a very sophisticated sense of graphic form with very telling content. The two worked together beautifully. I had taken a photography course many years earlier in college, but it just hadn’t clicked with me. Coming to his photographs after this intensive training as a painter, I really said, “That’s my medium.”

THC: You will be giving a talk next week relating to your participation in the Carpenter Center’s Exhibition “New Visiting Faculty 2011/12.” Could you give a little preview of what you will be speaking about?

DB: The work I’m going to be talking about on Thursday is about Palestine and Israel, and it has involved years of conversation and research and investigation. This is a project that I see as continuing an exploration of landscape as a sight of trauma, both historical and political. What I was interested in was the battlefield and what it is now. Is it a site that is a holy place, that’s a kind of sacred monument to slain martyrs, or is it a place where the local people lost and were dominated? These are exactly the thick and problematic kinds of historical stories that I want to excavate.

THC: What drew you to this particular project?

DB: I was involved in a long-term relationship with a third-generation Israeli. I made my first trip to Israel in 2005 just as a tourist and yet also went there with this sensibility of someone who looks at landscape through the prism of historical complexity. We kept noticing that as we visited official tourist places, quite often there were ruins nearby that weren’t marked. It dawned on us that these were remains of Palestinian villages that had been depopulated in 1948. These remains of the villages really intrigued us and so we came back and did some research on the history of Palestine before most of it was absorbed into the state of Israel.

THC: Some of your earlier work deals with homosexuality and society. What was your inspiration for those endeavors?

DB: I had just come out as a lesbian in 1985, so I was fairly new—fresh, one might say—to coming to terms with my sexuality. There was a project that I really wanted to do: it was to take old film stills from movies that I had watched growing up and insert myself into them as a character, thereby problematizing the heterosexual economy of the scene. This was the ’80s, so again there was a lot of discourse in film studies and photographic studies about the gender of the gaze in film spectatorship. I wanted to kind of disrupt the heterosexual terms that were being discussed. I created what came to be known as the “Dream Girls Project,”

which was based on my memories of even before I could name queer desire [but still] felt it and identified with it. This project came to … have a wonderful life beyond what I imagined.

THC: How has your experience been teaching here at Harvard?

DB: I love working with Harvard students because they are so bright, and they do the ground work. Sometimes, they want to know what the expectations are so that they know how to surpass them. It’s a little more linear, a little more goal-oriented. They won’t immediately try to be show-offs the way art students will. Of course, the world here is a much more logical, logos-centered universe. There are interesting differences between students here at Harvard and those at schools of art and design, but I don’t think one way is a better way to be an artist than the other.