photo-eye Bookstore + Project Space
celebrates its new location with exhibition of Robert Stivers’ work
For the past 30 years, old Polaroids have been tucked away in a box inside Robert Stivers’ Santa Fe studio. Dozens of images taken on the famed photographer’s Hasselbad camera weren’t specially archived or preserved. They were simply relics from photoshoots in the ’80s and ’90s, used at the time as test runs just to better frame a finished product.
“They aren’t meant to be art objects,” said Stivers, whose fine art photography is shown at venues from the New Mexico Museum of Art to the The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. “They’re meant to be studies for lighting and composition.”
Many of the instant-film Polaroids, mostly of people, have visibly aged and deteriorated. Some are discolored or covered in scratches from years in the box. Others were affected by Stivers messing around with them years later. Some he deliberately scratched, another has a burn mark,
and one image of a female subject was ripped in two and collaged with another.
Now, the images are being showcased as art in their own right. A new 40-image book of the Stivers Polaroids will be available this weekend at the new photo-eye Bookstore on Rufina Circle.
“They border on disturbing,” Stivers said of his old Polaroids. “It’s not an easy body of work, but I think it’s kind of fascinating. It has a lot to do with time, aging, ruin and deterioration. And I always think there’s a lot of beauty in that; what we think is old and useless has beauty.”
Pictures published in “Staging Pictures: Early Polaroids by Robert Stivers,” some of which are accompanied by the finished image that the photographer produced, will also be the first show at photo-eye’s expanded Project Space, a gallery area inside the store dedicated to showing works from new photography books.
The show puts a focus on the process behind Stivers’ dark, mysterious aesthethic by displaying what the book’s publisher, Andy Burgess, likened to an artist’s sketchbook.
“The work interestingly got darker over time,” said Burgess, who owns Dark Springs Press in Tuscon. “The more sort of beaten up these images became, the more evocative they were.”
The book launch and exhibition coincides with photoeye’s grand opening celebration for its new location in the growing Rufina Arts District. Citing a growing internet business and a desire for a more spacious setup for its niche, international audience, founder and director Rixon Reed moved the bookstore to Rufina Circle in March; photo-eye’s art gallery on South Guadalupe will stay open.
The photobook and print business began in Austin in 1979 but, since 1991, Reed had been in a 900-square-foot building on Garcia Street. He’s also conducted business online from that location since 1995, making photo-eye one of the first-ever e-commerce book websites, said Reed. Most of photo-eye’s sales now come via the web.
Reed said the company specializes in international materials from places like Japan and Europe.
“Things you can’t find on Amazon,” he noted. The business sells its signed books, limited editions or small press publications mostly to collectors and libraries.
He added that his audience has always been less local walk-ins and more aficionados who know photo-eye from its online store and visit the physical location as a “destination.” When he spoke to the Journal last week, he’d had recent customers from Norway and New Zealand.
The new two-story Bookstore and Project Space is nearly triple the size of the Garcia Street store, according to Reed. It can now stock about 3,000 titles on its shelves, including books coming out of storage from the company’s Siler Road warehouse.
The first floor, which has leather armchairs, tables and short shelves for browsing, makes for an enhanced store experience, according to Reed.
“This allows us to have a more comfortable environment for our customers,” he said. “They can browse and we can show books (with) interesting bindings or interesting content in a much better way.”
About half of new location’s first level is the dedicated to the Project Space, an expansion from just a single wall on Garcia Street.
That allows photo-eye to show more photographers with new work, like Stivers, who aren’t formally represented by its Railyard gallery on Guadalupe. “It’s a much broader field of artists we can work with,” said Reed.
The second floor is dedicated to online shipping and receiving, the main reason Reed said the business outgrew its old spot. He noted that while the number of shipments varies, the store can send out an average of 30-40 orders a day.
The move south also could be a chance to expand photoeye’s reach. According to Reed, more room means the staff, as well as visitors of any interest level, will have an easier time maneuvering through the inventory.
“We have books that anyone who likes photography would like,” he said. “… one of the great things about this space is we can more easily find those books and show them to people. It’s not like you have to be a sophisticated art-lover to be attracted to what we sell.”