Studio Visit with Noelle Tan

Hyattsville, MD

by Molly Springfield

When I first saw Noelle Tan’s black and white photographs in her 2005 solo exhibition at the District of Columbia Art Center, I thought they were drawings. My momentary confusion was a startling experience; we’re more accustomed to drawing or painting that mimics the “realness” of photography. Tan reverses that equation. Starting with images of landscapes, she manipulates the exposure time in her silver gelatin prints to produce large areas of black or white negative space. The resulting inscrutable photographs lack the visual markers that would normally anchor the image to a specific time and place.

Despite this manipulation—which she exerts in her home-based studio in Hyattsville, Maryland—Tan says, “Photography always has that sense of the real. Even if the image is highly manipulated, there is the notion that it is something that has actually existed.” The process of printing her own photographs in her darkroom is a vital component of Tan’s practice. “There is something personal about darkroom work. And shooting film is a different creative process then shooting digital.”.....

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