Zoë Zimmerman’s Photography Is a Search for Meaning


TAOS, New Mexico — Imagery is suspect these days. Endless filters, deep fakes, social media FOMO, the dark web — who’s to say what’s real? But while viewing Zoë Zimmerman’s photography exhibition Forsaken Objects and Untold Stories at Fechin House, I felt another kind of suspicion creep in: a distrust of sentimentality.

Zimmerman has made a name for herself as a studio photographer. Some readers may be familiar with “The Zimmerman Method,” an alternate albumen printing process that produces a matte surface, rather than the medium’s typically shiny one. Initially working in black and white, Zimmerman began experimenting with color, lighting, and depth of field in digital photography during the pandemic. Today her hauntingly romantic still lifes of dead birds, rotting fruit, knives, and linens or her complex scenes of mirrored female nudes read like modern-day Renaissance, Baroque, and Flemish paintings. In some photos, a single candle serves as her light source. 

Forsaken Objects and Untold Stories takes as its subject the Fechin family’s personal possessions, found in the basement of the house, which is now part of the Taos Art Museum. The Russian portrait artist and woodworker Nicolai Fechin, his wife Alexandra Belkovitch, and their only daughter, Eya, immigrated to New York in 1923 and moved to Taos in 1927, where they lived for six years.

Installation view of Zoë Zimmerman’s Forsaken Objects and Untold Stories at the Taos Art Museum at Fechin House, Taos, New Mexico (photo by Nancy Zastudil/Hyperallergic)

As the title implies, the exhibition is unapologetically sentimental and nostalgic. Installed throughout the house, Zimmerman’s richly colored archival pigment prints hang in close proximity to Fechin’s paintings and to the very objects depicted in the photographs: a vase, a music box, a bar of soap. Zimmerman also makes great use of humble materials such as a tissue stuffed into a glass bottle and a crumpled brown paper bag, their textures, folds, and hues lending themselves to reminiscences of lives lived and days gone by.

In general, Zimmerman’s work is heavily metaphorical — some might even say didactic. A lemon represents the bitterness of life, a dead bird signifies lost hope, as she explained during an artist talk last year at the SE Center for Photography. No surprises there. I’m reminded of other photographers, such as Laura Letinsky, who also employ tropes of the domestic, discarded, and melancholic. Or Susan kae Grant, whose dark palette and dreamlike settings embrace magical realism. But here Zimmerman does something different, something that makes me uneasy. By creating still life photographs from the Fechin family’s everyday items, she inserts herself into the personal history of others and asks viewers to do the same. The result is a series of contrived scenes onto which we are free to project emotion and meaning, where perhaps there needn’t be any. A wine jug, three-fourths full. A singular ornate blue shoe. A used paintbrush. 

Some philosophers would say it’s our impending, inevitable mortality that prompts nostalgia, mourning the loss of what we never had. And isn’t that the very nature or history of still life imagery, telling contrived stories and presenting objects as metaphors for life and death? 

As I questioned my suspicion of and resistance to Zimmerman’s photographs, I found myself gravitating toward those in which I could find evidence of the artist herself — a burning cigarette, a squeezed tube of Alexandra’s vacuum cleaner machine oil with the contents snaked out just so. I was doing the very thing for which I was critical of Zimmerman: making meaning by searching for clues, activating life through stillness. With that realization, I suddenly longed for more time … with the photographs, with everything. My distrust had turned to desire. Sentimental indeed.

Forsaken Objects and Untold Stories continues at the Taos Art Museum at Fechin House (227 Paseo del Pueblo Norte, Taos, New Mexico) through March 30. The exhibition was curated by Christy Coleman, Taos Art Museum’s executive director.

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