Postcard From Cleveland

By Chantal Sudbrack ’97

Popular online services for sharing wedding albums and baby pictures have paved the way for do-it-yourself (DIY) photobooks, which have in turn revolutionized how artists do art and promote themselves. In December, 16 Reedies (spanning 44 years in class years), family, and friends from northeast Ohio attended a gallery talk on this art genre by Barbara Tannenbaum ’75, Cleveland Museum of Art’s curator of photography.

Barbara’s exhibition, DIY: Photographers & Books, was heralded as one of the best exhibits in Cleveland last fall, and one could see why! “It’s very different from almost every other display in the museum,” Tannenbaum says. “You can handle all the art. And it’s very inexpensive. If you like it, you can buy it.” One of Tannenbaum’s favorite pieces is the teeny, tiny Things Darby Chewed, a chronicling of items that the photographer’s dog got its mouth on. Another multivolume work titled ASTRONOMICAL boasts one letter of the title on each spine. More importantly, the pages take the reader through the entire solar system. Each double-page spread represents 2 million kilometers, and most simply show empty black space. An aptly named piece, Psycho, captures every frame from the famous Hitchcock film. After the tour, many in the group stayed to share in conversation, food, and drinks at the museum’s recently opened Provenance Café.

Live in or near the Cleveland area? Want to join us? Email Chantal Sudbrack ’97