John Reuter: Investigations By the time the early 90's arrived I began to lose the momentum of the Pere La Chaise work and would briefly return to the Androgyny collages. Both series seemed to have reached a natural conclusion and I was searching for something to replace them. What I needed was a new source of imagery and it came in a very unexpected way. I had been aware of digital images since the late 1970s. There were artists from MIT that were working with Polaroid to produce digital images output on Polaroid 20x24 film. I was not directly involved but did get to see some of the imagery. Some of it intrigued me but for the most part I felt it reflected the technology too much and the artist’s vision too little. The worst of it I came to think of as "Star Trek Surrealism", unlikely juxtapositions of planets and birds in rather obvious and not terribly interesting compositions. So I was certainly not inspired to become digital from seeing that. Instead it was one of those chance exposures that caught me at the right moment. By 1992 Polaroid had entered the digital market and was marketing products like a print scanner and film recorder, primarily aimed at the business graphics market. There was to be a trade show in Manhattan to show these products and several Polaroid representatives asked me if they could use the 20x24 studio to test out and run through their presentations before they arrived at the show. They set up on one table a print scanner, a Mac with Adobe Photoshop® and a film recorder. I saw for the first time the process of entering images, manipulating and combining them and outputing them to film. This was an amazing revelation to me and I knew then somehow I had to have this. It was difficult and my road was circuitous, but I eventually got there. I bought a computer, an IBM clone because it was all I could afford then and Aldus Photostyler, because Photoshop was not yet available on the PC. My start was slow but eventually I got my own scanner and film recorder from Polaroid and began to create collages and output them to 20x24 film via 4x5 transparency. For the first year the work was quite transitional, I was reworking many old ideas and images. What I needed was a project to take advantage of my growing skills and again fate seemed to intervene. I was invited through Barbara Hitchcock of Polaroid to photograph in the building that was to become the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York. The museum was to occupy a building on Orchard Street that had existed since the early 1800s and housed generations of immigrants until 1930.. The building was closed then by the landlord because he was weary of meeting New York City code for apartments, which had swung greatly in favor of tenants as time passed. Only a ground floor commercial space remained and the top five floors were sealed. They were only unsealed in 1993, revealing 60 years of water damage, humidity swelling and dryness contraction. The walls and ceilings had peeled, collapsed and transformed themselves into abstract expressionist reliefs and sculptures. I was asked to help document the state of the rooms before they were restored for the museum. In doing so I was inspired by the strong sense of the spirits I felt still there. As I walked alone among the rooms lit only by a single incandescent bulb I could not help but feel the presence of generations of individuals and families who occupied these spaces. This inspired me to use the images as backgrounds to combine with my collection of 19th century portraits of men, women and children. The resulting series was the Lower East Side Tenement project which gave my digital desires some content. I continued to output these collages as Polacolor Image Transfers and continued to rework them with pastel and dry pigment. This series to me was as much as a breakthrough as my Androgyn series was five years earlier. In time my skills in Photoshop began to develop and this oddly created an aesthetic crisis. My format of creating digital collages, outputting them to film, printing to 20x24 and creating Image Transfers that I would paint began to show signs of stress. While my compositions were once simple figure in a room scenario, this began to give way to more complex combinations of images that only Adobe Photoshop® could produce. My once beloved format of Image Transfer that served me well for so long was now beginning to take away from my vision. I began to look for alternate ways of printing the images. I began to output to Iris, a sophisticated ink jet technology first developed for the printing industry and converted to art printers by pioneers like Graham Nash and David Adamson. Once I saw my more complex collages printed this way, there was no going back. My first series that reflected this is what I call the "Mythic Reality" series. It utilizes portraits of my former assistant Tricia Rosenkilde in combinations of Pre-Raphaelite sources and landscapes. It takes advantage of some fairly sophisticated blending techniques that Photoshop offers and that have become the cornerstone of my working methodology. This series gives way to the "Jupiter" series. Jupiter is actually the name of an island in Florida. One of my clients, Jennifer Johnson owns a home there and brought me there with the Polaroid 20x24 camera. Her home occupies a beautiful grounds that has incredible examples of tropical wildlife. I was inspired there to produce Gauguin like images that wanted to capture the sense of Paradise. I also was enamored by the name Jupiter, which seemed to imply an existence and reality as removed as the distant planet. My most recent series is images from Tuscany. I had the privilege to share a workshop with Joyce Tenneson on the nude in Tuscany last summer. For the first time in my life I am so backlogged with potential images. These are the first collages to result from that experience and they are truly a work in progress. Return to Biography