Original subtitles

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- [Narrator] Since the '70s,

as an essential and remarkable figure of photography,

Yan Groover has built a major work for nearly 40 years.

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- [Bruce] Actually, we met in high school.

She was two years behind me in high school.

I knew her a little bit my senior year there.

And we both were in an art class together.

And when I was in the army in Panama,

I had always been in touch with that art teacher

and she gave Jan my address and we started corresponding.

We couldn't have done it any other way

because we were both so shy and backward

and we were married about a year after that.

So she went to Pratt Art School.

But as I did not get much out of university

and flunked out after two years.

She didn't flunk out.

She graduated,

but I don't think she got very much out of it.

She majored in painting and graphics

and she learned a lot about printmaking,

but she wasn't interested in printmaking

and she didn't really get a lot about painting.

Eventually she did some nice paintings later on,

but around the time actually curiously,

that she was getting really excited about photography.

We'd been married about a year

and she bought a single lens reflex camera

and she used it a lot,

but nothing spectacular.

It was just sort of normal pictures of braids

and stuff like that.

Pictures of her husband.

It was in Hartford,

we'd been married about three years

and she was teaching

at the University of Hartford Art School.

And she just got going.

She just got going.

And it started with triptychs and things of...

Cars and trucks on the highway that would just

line up with a light pole as if they were hanging off it.

And it would be a red car, a yellow car,

and a blue car all just right at the pole.

And the original ones were all drugstore prints,

the colour prints.

She had little dark rooms

she was using anyway that she made up.

But then she got...

It was really only in New York

that she started really doing colour and printing it herself.

We moved to New York in '73

and she'd been doing pretty exciting things

for about a year before then with her little photos

and triptychs.

She was teaching at State University

in New York in Purchase in the photo department.

And I was teaching at School of Visual Arts in New York.

We both taught just a couple days a week.

I taught a day and a night a week.

I taught painting in the daytime on Fridays

and modern contemporary art slide class

on Wednesday nights.

And Jan taught all day one Thursday...

Thursday a semester

and the other semester would be all day Thursday and Friday.

And we loved it.

It was our day out.

It was...

We both loved teaching.

And then when she got to New York,

she started doing triptychs as well.

But they were of city buildings

and not necessarily involving cars,

but sometimes involving trucks,

especially trucks

'cause a truck would block out a building suddenly

in one image.

And she just got going.

She just got going.

And at some point in the mid '70s

she decided she wanted to get away from that

as if that was sort of a trademark crutch kind of thing.

And she bought some...

I think they were dried flowers,

but they might have been false flowers, I don't know.

And she started photographing them in a vase

in her little zone in the loft we had

she used as a studio.

And for about two weeks she did that.

And she wasn't satisfied at all with it.

And I wasn't either.

They just looked so bland.

And one afternoon, this is true,

there was only two times I helped Jan

specifically in her work.

And this was the first one.

She was photographing and getting frustrated.

And I was standing in the kitchen

waiting for coffee to be ready.

And I looked at our toaster,

which was just a sort of normal chrome plated toaster,

full of grease and crumbs and things.

You could just see a little bit of a reflection in it.

And I just got into looking at that

and I said, "Jan, come here.

This is what you might be doing."

You know, and that got her going

with the kitchen still life stuff.

But she never photographed the toaster.

That was Jan.

The early kitchen still life things

were really kitchen still lifes.

I mean, a sink with some water and soap subs in it

with a dirty frying pan full of...

Just parts of fried egg and just...

Wild.

And then she got into more...

You know, less messy stuff.

But one thing just seemed to lead to another.

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And she just took off.

She just took off.

And the kitchen still lives ended up not necessarily

being about the kitchen,

but stuff like that.

Furniture and things and things leaning against furniture.

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Her first exhibition was in 1974 in New York

at Light Gallery.

She was in a little back room,

of the little triptychs and diptychs

with cars and trucks from Hartford.

It was funny because my first exhibition...

She was December, 1974

and I was at Sonnabend in January '75

and the last day of her exhibition

was the first day of mine.

So our families came in and they went to both.

I mean, our families didn't pay attention

to any of this stuff,

but it was sort of neat.

And that was her only exhibition at Light.

And after that she was in

I don't know how many galleries she went with Sonnabend

but she was with Max Protetch first.

I was showing at Sonnabend.

And we were good friends with the guy

who was the director of Sonnabend.

And one day he got excited and, you know,

and Ileana got excited so she started showing there.

I don't know how many shows she had there.

But there's a funny thing with the kitchen still lifes,

her first show there was big colour triptychs of houses,

suburban houses, all kind of stuff.

And when Ileana saw the kitchen still lifes up

or in the process of going up on the walls,

it was really shocking to me

because she didn't know that that was being shown.

She thought it was gonna be more triptychs.

Now Ileana knew what was going on in that gallery.

I just couldn't believe she didn't know

that that's what it was.

And she said to Jan, "I hate them,"

just like that.

And this is Ileana with her famous eye

and cash register started ringing

and she started to like 'em.

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- [Narrator] Apart from galleries,

Jan had shows in many American museums

in particular at the MoMA in 1987.

- As Jan got to be more and more important,

she got more friendly with a lot of photographers,

Ralph Gibson, Lee Friedlander.

It was exciting for us, really exciting.

We knew...

Not everybody, but an awful lot of people

and people we'd heard of, you know,

so that was...

Meeting Rauschenberg

and have him talk to you in an easy way.

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She got a commission to do special photograph

for someone.

She did one little ad.

The only advertising thing I can recall was,

there was a English cigarette company,

I forget the name of it.

And it was shocking.

She got paid a lot for that.

Like $25,000 for a photo.

Just...

But normally, no, normally it didn't happen very often.

She did...

Once in a while a magazine would ask her to photograph...

Esquire magazine in New York

asked her to photograph a few people here and there

who were...

They were writing something about.

And she did some of that.

There was one, she went down to Florida

and photographed a guy who was on death row

in one of the prisons there.

Beautiful photograph.

He's just sitting there at the table across from her,

black guy, nice looking guy.

And, you know, he's handcuffed.

Jan spent a lot of time with him that day.

But she didn't do things like that very often.

Wasn't asked to do it.

I don't think she turned anybody down.

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It was during the U.S. elections in the fall of 1988.

And I said to Jan,

I think if Bush wins,

we ought to take seriously the idea of getting out,

not because I was afraid of Bush

or thought he was awful or anything,

it meant they wanted more of Ronald Reagan, the people.

And she immediately agreed with me

and we didn't even say where we were gonna go.

We assumed Paris, both of us.

'Cause we'd been vacationing in Paris for about five years

before that when school was out.

And we came to Paris the next spring when school was out.

It's very funny,

in the cab from the airport to downtown Paris,

I was aware we're not ready for this.

I mean, just trying to tell the taxi driver

where we were going was just too clumsy, too awful.

And we looked around at real estate windows

and things and saw that the prices were...

Of things were higher than in New York even.

And we decided we're not ready yet.

We'll think about it for next year.

And during the year,

we both did our best to learn as much French as we could.

But we moved here in 1991 and it was spring of 1991.

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I was shocked to go into this Witkin gallery the first time.

I think I was supposed to review a show there.

And the walls were just covered with all this stuff

that I've been seeing in books.

I thought someone can actually buy them.

And I brought Jan down to the gallery two days later

and we went through bins and things

and that was the beginning of our collecting.

And well, we never argued about a photograph.

We very rarely even discussed it.

If I was excited about a print,

she tended to be as well.

And the same thing the other way around.

We decided to sell all of it.

We wanted both 'cause we were...

This house was being supposedly finished in the meantime.

And like most construction stories,

we were running outta money because cost overruns

and everything was more expensive than they had said.

And also I didn't like the idea of

bringing New York with us here.

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- [Narrator] It is in this (indistinct) house

that Jan Groover will instal her studio

left as it was at her death in 2012.

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- Before she moved here,

she did the big colour still lifes, the...

Like this.

And when you walked in her studio in New York on the Bowery,

it looked like a stage set.

I mean, it was so elaborate,

what she'd done with it

behind the tables and stuff that were there

she was gonna photograph.

And when she got here,

she did the same thing essentially, but outside.

And there's a lot of platinum prints,

big platinum prints of...

Right around out here of her just putting ladders

and this and that and that here.

And then just...

And taking the photos.

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It was very much like what she was doing in New York,

except it was outside

because we hadn't been outside for most of our lives.

And it was big space.

And so it was exciting.

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And that was one of the other times

that I actually helped her in her photographs.

There would be like a phoney Greek column pedestal.

And she'd put a board across that

and then stuff on top of it.

That would be the still life.

And they're very nice.

But after a while she was getting

really frustrated with that

because they felt like they were coming out the same.

And I said, simply take care of the bottoms.

Because the bottoms all basically were the same.

It was just the action was a top half of the photo.

And that's when the colours still lifes happened.

I mean, actually I didn't imagine that.

But I mean, the huge...

And also, boy did she take care of the bottoms.

It was just amazing.

When you see the photo,

it's not just all over the place, it's just...

This is pointing to that.

And that's...

It's like a renaissance painting

and that's one of the things about Jan's work.

It's never about the subject.

I can't say never, but almost never.

Usually if it's about the subject, it was a joke.

But it was about space and how things relate to each other.

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She had four by fives and eight by tens.

And the one she had especially made the big wide one,

12/20, that's basically what she used.

But she used also some 35 millimetre

once in a while in those days, not often.

She did print herself.

I don't know much about that,

but I know it was a fairly elaborate deal

with the chemicals and the material itself.

The platinum and palladium.

And she had to have a special box

with fluorescent tubes in it of a special kind that

exposed the thing.

And it had to be a contact print.

That's one of the reasons she wanted a big camera.

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She didn't cheat on anything.

That's what I can say about technically.

And she didn't manoeuvre,

including with a digital camera and computers and stuff.

She didn't play with negatives.

It's all just straight.

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I remember there's one beautiful photo she took here.

I don't know if we have a print of it or not,

of some friends with their three kids

who lived in the hills up there,

English people.

And they invited us to dinner one night in the summer

and we were eating outdoors.

And Jan had her big 1220 camera there

set up and ready to go and photographing the family

in front of the house.

And at some point she just said, "Now."

I mean, everybody just moved so quickly.

And the mother wanted to dress her little girls

who were naked.

"No, there's no time.

No time."

And the sun was just right in the sky.

And the photo just turned out beautiful.

It looks like a Ruben's.

I mean, not with the movement of a Rubens's,

but with the...

Just the kind of celebration of Ruben's.

I mean, it's just such a beauty.

But I just remember her...

Jan is not someone who was very insistent on things usually,

but boy, she was...

Just like that.

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I think she got in a sort of art sense smarter.

Meaning smarter at looking at things.

And a lot of people don't understand how to look at things

as far as I'm concerned anyway.

I mean, they...

All they care about is the subject matter

and what the painting...

Or photo means,

meaning is it's...

Jan's photos never mean anything.

And she just really wants

the visual excitement of it,

of your eye just flying around

and not knowing where to land.

There was an early American painter,

early century, 20th century,

I can't remember which one it was,

fairly well known,

who called it the entropy of the eye.

And that was sort of what she was after.

And she got it.

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