TIM MAUL
LOST

Limited Edition Portfolio

-10 original signed and numbered photographs (32,9 x 48,3 cm / 13 x 29 in - size of paper)
-128 page book (23 x 31 cm / 9 x 12 in )

Each photo is printed on Hahnemühle textured Museum Etching paper and protected by Terphane sleeves
The photos and book are contained in a labeled custom made canvas clamshell box
Each box is individually numbered
Edition of 8 copies plus 1 Artist Proof and 2 hors commerce
Price available upon request

Available end of 2011

© 2011 onestar press / CAMERA ARTISTS / the authors

Click here to see Tim Maul's photos in high resolution.

Lost (appearance alone)

Sometime in the summer of 1975 I stepped outside an apartment in San Diego to take a photograph. I was staying with people I barely knew and was marooned in a world of sun, beach, and continuous social interaction. Like Marcel Duchamp, whose art I then admired, my purpose in ‘taking’ a photograph (as opposed to ‘making’ one) was to produce an image of ‘visual indifference’ and ‘total absence of good or bad taste’. Geographically speaking, I was not ‘lost’. After finishing the School of Visual Arts in 1973 I was determined to work with the camera, a machine which I have never grown accustomed to. As a student I had been greatly impressed with the films of Michael Snow and by conceptual art-where photography played a supportive role to an idea. I was also beginning to consider ‘narrative’. I did not especially relate to the ‘street’ photographers of the 60’s whose images felt like an extension of aggressive 50’s abstract paintings (I do now). For me, the camera meant ‘work’ and I never traveled with one or took casual pictures. Every image produced had to mean something and have some greater purpose. I felt embarrassed being seen with a camera, and still do. In the early 80’s I revisited rural Ireland, where I had spent some time as a teenager and it was here my camera came out of hiding. I also had the opportunity to travel in relation to showing my art-first in America and later in Europe and Canada in cities like Paris, Dublin, Montreal, Antwerp and Bruxelles; not exactly ‘National Geographic’ exotica but urban centers of richness, complexity, and residual sorrows. This form of tourism is specific to the business end of culture and provides unplanned down time where the artist on the road is often psychically all dressed up with no place to go. A mission beyond your hotel to exchange currency or visit an obscurely situated art context could result with one getting lost. This slot of time presented itself to me as an anxious space in which I could photograph. I developed this impulse into a habit. When lost, I would pause to photograph something I would not ordinarily notice like ducks on an Irish pond. They recalled early conceptual art’s concern with temporality or the movement from point A to point B. Frequently I would pause before vacant stores, wondering what I would ‘capture on film’. Waiting around for people, a staple of art-related travel provided an opportunity to wander off and open doors in unexpected places-like French film studios suspended in pre-digital time. Jet-lag and travel fatigue also informed my decisions on where to point my 35mm transforming myself, by appearance alone into a photographer. Around 2000 I stopped taking ‘lost’ pictures. I wonder this decision coincided with the era when humans began to mesh physically with communication, mapping, or image capturing devices. Like Marcel’s bottle rack, becoming lost (for adults) may be something you have to choose. Reviewing this collection produced some melancholy but no nostalgic ‘stroll down memory lane’. They are evidence of a dream world unto me.

Tim Maul NYC 11/09

Because most of there images were selected from a box marked LOST except where noted dates are approximate.

1) ‘Lost 4/10 (San Diego)’ 1974
2) ‘Lost 10/10 (Marais, Paris)’ Mid-1990’s
3) ‘Lost 9/10 (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris)’ Mid-1990’s
4) ‘Lost 6/10 (Upper East Side, NYC)’ 2002
5) ‘Lost 5/10 (Dublin, Ireland)’ 2000
6) ‘Lost 1/10 (Eight Street, NYC)’ Mid-1980’s
7) ‘Lost 8/10 (Syracuse, NY)’ 1999
8) ‘Lost 3/10 (New York City)’ Late-1980’s
9) ‘Lost 7/10 (Brussels)’ 1992
10) ‘Lost 2/10 (Ireland)’ Mid-1980’s

Notes on the images

1) Disorientation in California. Staying with ‘friends of friends’ on way to Phoenix.
2) Another empty store in Paris. A ghost room, like heaven. Several years later I photographed the space again in its incarnation as an awful gallery.
4) Moving to this area I became obsessed with this corner. The Summer of Love.
5) A monument in a Dublin park. Jetlagged. Looking for a bank. I felt like the photographer in ‘Blow Up’.
6) A ‘flickering’ wall when the West Village still had an edge
7) Syracuse during a winter residency at ‘Lightworks’. I harbored ‘X-File’ anxieties about being alone at night waiting for buses. 9) Beaubourg-possibly looking for a lavoratory. This institution always brings techno music to mind
8) Empty store on 8th St. I was possibly returning home from a club or opening. It looked like an ‘installation’. .
9) A cathedral floor in central Brussels. Crypt. Photographed a confessional and felt this under my feet, looked down and took the picture.
10) An elegant sheep. Truly lost driving from Galway to Westport. Hung over. Wrong film, exposure, etc. Discovered later we were in ‘Maam’s Cross’.

Tim Maul is an artist and critic living in New York City. He studied painting at The New York School of Visual Arts from 1969-73. Since that time he has worked with photography as a medium that elevates impulse, provides personal orientation, and produces narrative. He participated in numerous seminal 70’s exhibitions including “About 405 East 13th Street” (’75), “A Month of Sundays” P.S 1, (’76) and “Love is Blind” Castelli Graphics, (’81). Group exhibitions include “Extended Photography” Vienna Biennale (’81), “Perspective Sonorities”, Venice Biennale, (’82), and “The Photography of Invention, American Pictures of the 80’s”, (’89) National Museum of Art, Washington D.C. and “Strangers: ICP’s First Triennial of Photography and Video” (’03) New York. Selected one person shows include Galleriaforma, Genoa, Italy (’80), Artist Space, NY (’83), CEPA, Buffalo NY (’84), 121 Art Gallery , Antwerp, Belgium (’88,’92), Leslie Tonkonow Artworks and Projects, (’99), Project, Dublin Ireland, (’00) and Senior & Shopmaker Gallery NY, (’00,’03). Maul has produced editions and publications through Onestar Press in Paris, France. With Onestar he has published “Studio Visit” (’00) and “Conversations” (’03) a collaboration with the Japanese writer Chie Machida. He currently contributes criticism to Art in America, CIRCA Dublin/Belfast, and Afterart, Paris. Reviews of his exhibitions have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Arts Magazine, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CIRCA, LIGEIA, and Guardian Unlimited (U.K.). Maul’s work in paranormal circles have led to inclusion in “Incognito” (’91) Curt Marcus Gallery NYC, “Shooting Blind” (’94) Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, “The Cottingly Faeries and other Apparations” (’98) Leslie Tonkonow Artworks and Projects and The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis TN, “Marking Time” Grant Pirrie, Sydney, Australia, “Seeing Things” (’07) at The Photographers Gallery, London and “The Devils Half-Acre” at Sometimes, NYC