Strange Fire

Q&A: Shellburne thurber

By Jess T. Dugan | October 28, 2021

Shellburne Thurber (b. 1949) is based in Cambridge, MA. Her work addresses issues of loss, containment and the synergistic relationship of constructed space and human energy. She graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University. She has shown extensively both in the United States and abroad. She has been the recipient of the Anonymous Was A Woman Grant, an Alpert/Ucross Residency Prize, a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship from Harvard University and a Saint Gaudens National Historic Site Fellowship. Her work is in numerous collections including The Harvard Art Museums, The Museum of Fine Art, Boston, and The Addison Gallery of  American Art. She is presently working on a book of her analytic interiors.

Jess T. Dugan: Hi Shellburne! Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. You have had a long and varied career over the past almost 50 years, so, briefly, perhaps: what first led you to photography, and what was your path to getting to where you are today?

Shellburne Thurber: It’s hard to know exactly when and where I began. I started taking pictures in my late teens and continued when I briefly attended Skidmore College. I came into the college with photos in hand that I had taken casually over the previous year or two. Soupy, overly sensitive self-portraits, close ups of rocks and flowers, beach shots… that sort of thing. Awful stuff. But it was a start. Weirdly, the art department did not have a photography class I could take, but the school did have a system that had a fall and spring term and then an interim winter term where you could fashion your own course. I decided to focus on photographing close ups of distressed billboards… they kind of looked like Aaron Siskinds. I was interested in design at the time, and photographing abstractly appealed to me. In all honesty, it was also a way to get out of Dodge. I disingenuously argued at the time that the only way I could do this project was to move to Boston for the month and pursue the project there. A friend’s father was a doctor in the Boston area and had a darkroom. I believe he was the one who taught me how to process film and make prints. My stint at Skidmore didn’t last long and I ended up moving into Saratoga Springs, which was a great place to be living at the time (late sixties). I ended up renting a room in a fabulous Stanford White designed Victorian which had a motley and unusual collection of residents. I was fairly lost at the time due to the death of my mother who died very young of breast cancer. My fellow housemates became a kind of surrogate family. They also represented an alternative to the standard way of being in the world that I didn’t feel particularly comfortable with. In some ways I felt like I had found my tribe. A group of misfits who self-segregated in the house according to floor. Members of a NY state motorcycle club lived on the first floor, the jockeys who worked at the track lived on the second floor, the witches lived on the third, and a handful of artists lived on the top of the house. It was wild and lots of fun. At one point I was giving drawing classes to the bikers who lived downstairs. I mention this time because I believe this is when I started to think about photography as something more than a hobby. There was a way that it could record community and give evidence to my life that was important considering how much my family lost when my mother died. We came apart at the seams and everything I had known and that had provided stability died with her. This is also the point when I started seriously photographing my family, which I have continued to do to the present day. My transfer to the Boston Museum School concretized this fledgling interest. I was lucky enough to fall into one of Bill Burke’s classes where I met other photographers and artists who were thinking along the same lines I was. Bill was also a fantastic teacher. He was open minded and curious and allowed his students to follow their noses rather than trying to force them into a certain aesthetic direction.

JTD: That’s wonderful- I love hearing about your early life and beginning with photography.  Much of your work focuses on the energy of space, whether it is a personal place, such as your family home, or an institutional space, such as the Boston Athenaeum. And, of course, you are well known for your photographs made in psychoanalyst’s offices. But the spaces you photograph are always so much about the people who have inhabited them. Can you talk to me about this theme in your work? What originally led you to photograph spaces? How has your thinking about the energy of place shifted over time?

ST: Shortly after my mother died, I began taking trips out to southern Indiana to see my grandmother. She lived in a Hopper like house set on a hillock in the middle of vast cornfields. She was deeply depressed, having lost most of her family within a short span of time… her husband and two of her three children passed within a few years of each other. I was too mired in my own sadness around my mother’s death and probably not mature enough to understand how devastating it must have been for her. She spent much of her time indoors with all the shades pulled. When she went to bed at night I skulked around looking for something that would give me a clue into who my mother was but, for as cluttered as the house was, it was weirdly devoid of anything personal. And then it hit me that the house itself was the clue... that in some ways, it said more about my mother and the way she grew up than any childhood trinket or other type of memento could. I shot a few rolls and when I got back to Boston and looked at them, I knew I had stumbled onto something interesting.

Certainly, I never intended to pursue this line of inquiry, but I always had my camera with me and it just kind of happened. I had been mostly taking pictures of people up until that point, and continued to do so, but looking at the pictures of the house my mother grew up in, I realized that space could speak to character in a way that straight up portraiture couldn’t. I have always felt that portraiture is more about the photographer anyway. Not that it doesn’t capture something true about the sitter, but it is always mediated through the eye of the person behind the camera. This fascination with space continued when I made some pictures of my Aunt Anna’s house shortly after she died. We were very close and I wanted to photograph the house in an effort to process this loss. I took a set with the house furnished in black and white and then another set after the house had been emptied out. Interestingly, the color ones of the empty house were so much more evocative and true to my aunt’s nature. The light streaming in through the windows became her in some sense. And as I looked at them I felt that I had captured her energy in a way that I couldn’t with the furnished ones. It was almost as if her belongings were weighing her down, and without them she was free to be purely herself. From that point on I was on a roll. I photographed abandoned homes in North Carolina, sacred spaces in the Adirondack State Park, and the Boston Athenaeum as you mentioned, to name a few. Over time what became clear to me was that except for private domiciles, most space is an interesting mix of public and private and it is this intersection of the two that really intrigues me.

JTD: One of the things I’ve always loved about your work is how you let the pictures guide you, figuring out the specifics of each project in response to what the subject matter demands, rather than having a clear framework in mind and simply going out and making pictures to fill it. What is your process like for making work? How much of your work is intuitive and how much is premeditated? Or perhaps that isn’t even a real dichotomy…

ST: I would have to say that, for the most part, the pictures evolve out of the process of taking them. I usually have a theme, although that isn’t necessarily true with the family work. But I will take on a project, either one that is self-generated or one that has been commissioned, and inevitably, no matter what the subject is, the work ends up being about all these central issues that I have been dealing with from the outset… loss, containment (or the lack of it), energetic presence, space as a stand in for human presence. I also have a camera with me most of the time and take pictures of any and everything. Sometimes these pictures lead into something more thematically cohesive. My little snapshot camera works as a sketch book in this regard… a way to work out ideas in a less cumbersome way than dragging around my larger film cameras. And being digital is a plus. You know what you have immediately.

JTD: Let’s talk about your exhibition, Phantom Limb, which was on view at the Krakow Witkin Gallery in Boston, MA, in 2019. While this exhibition was certainly in line with other work you’ve made, it was incredibly personal, as it took as its subject your family home and the accompanying history and losses. Can you talk to me about this exhibition and how it came to be? What was your process for making the work itself, and what was your experience sharing it with the world through this exhibition?

ST: My brother Steve once said that every body of work I’ve made is actually about the house that my mother left the four of us when she died. In some sense, it raised us in her absence. We still have it and it has remained just as it was fifty years ago when she left and has played a pivotal role in my life and the lives of my brothers. At various points in time, we have all lived there, and it was the place we congregated after my mother passed. My father remarried shortly after her death and it became fairly clear that life as we knew it no longer existed. When my stepmother and her three children moved into the house in Nashua where we grew up, it just seemed easier to decamp to northern New Hampshire where my mother’s house is. It continued as a gathering point for us until my brothers got married and had families of their own, at which point their homes eventually became the loci of family events. I had been trying to photograph the house for years and somehow just couldn’t make it happen. Much of the family work I have done was shot up there, but as far as the actual space itself without people, it just wasn’t happening. It resisted me for some reason. I hadn’t had a show at the gallery in a while and Andrew Witkin, a good friend and one of the owners, felt that it was time for me to get out there again. I had been mulling over a project involving the house so I figured I would try again.

The house didn’t make it easy. When I first went up with all my equipment, I came down with what felt like some kind of horrible flu. I packed the car back up the next day and returned to Cambridge. As soon as I stepped into my home here, it went away. So a couple of days later, I went back up and this time my tripod broke. I took what I could without it and, when I returned home and brought the tripod to the local camera store, it had magically fixed itself. The third time out, the film was ruined. The fourth time was the charm. From that point on I guess the house figured I wasn’t going to give up, relented and finally agreed to be photographed. I knew from the beginning that I wanted something more than pictures on a wall. My previous show at the gallery had been centered around my friend Ralph Horne’s home here in Boston and had been a full on installation which was a lot of fun to do and had an enveloping feel that I wanted to replicate in this show.

I wanted the exhibit to feel like another interior. Rooms within a room. I had also done a project at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Park in Cornish, NH where I incorporated the landscape as well as some portraits, so that project influenced this one as well. I had some friends who thought that I should fold my family work into this exhibit but I felt that it would be more powerful without a human presence. The house is so intense and energetically active on its own that I didn’t want to mess with that. And, much like the very early work in Indiana, I felt the house spoke to our family more eloquently than portraits would. But unlike my earlier work, it is hard for me these days to think about constructed space separate from the space that it, in turn, sits in. This is especially true with my mother’s house, which is surrounded by water, mountains and forest.

The final exhibit incorporated the landscape by becoming the “wallpaper” for the exhibition as well as being represented in the final line up of pictures. The way I see it, landscape is just another kind of interior. I like playing around with that idea… the idea of the human interior as it plays out in constructed space which in turn exists in another natural interior… a bit like those Russian nesting dolls.  I wanted to create an intimate experience where the viewer was immersed in a subjective, albeit abstracted, facsimile of what I experience when I am at the house. Kind of an “inside of my brain” thing. Andrew put me in the small, contained space off to the side of the main gallery, which was perfect. It allowed for the material to wrap itself around the viewer in quite an intimate way. What I didn’t know when I began this project was that I would lose my younger brother Geof unexpectedly the winter before the show. The loss was devastating for all of us.  The installation became a testament to him and my love for him, hence the title. My brothers and I felt like we had lost one of the legs of our four legged stool. Because the exhibition was so personal, I wasn’t sure how it would come off to someone who wasn’t me. I was too close to the material. It was interesting, though. As people came in to view it, Andrew told me that rather than do a quick spin around the room and walk out, most people would spend a long time in the space. And apparently it moved many of them to tears. I was stunned and gratified to know that it hit many viewers on a deep level. The show had been oddly easy to pull together considering all the moving parts. Normally something goes wrong and has to be redone or gets delayed but in this case it was, for the most part, smooth sailing. I had to think that Geof had something to do with that.

JTD: It was a very beautiful, and very moving, show. I’m not surprised at all that it moved many viewers to tears.

Tell me about your project Analytic, which you’ve been working on for many years. How did it begin? What drew you to photograph the offices of psychoanalysts? You are currently working on a book of this work, yes?

ST: The analytic pictures perfectly exemplify the idea of the private and public that I mentioned earlier. Often these offices are located in the analyst’s home and have all sorts of objects that are weighted in meaning for the practitioner. But as the patient, one quickly comes to see the space as yours for the fifty minutes you are in it, forgetting that most likely many other people think of it the same way you do. The space becomes the analysis in a way, a site of projection. These offices are also, from an energetic standpoint, complicated for exactly this reason… you have so many people and their histories colliding in one spot. And as a clue into the nature of the analyst, these spaces are intriguing. Some are cluttered and look like they’ve been lived in for decades. Others are very spare and give little insight into the personality of the person they belong to. I am reminded of a story an analyst in New Haven told me. A prospective patient had made an appointment to meet her to determine if she was someone the patient could work with. Apparently the two of them got along well but the patient had a difficult time with the couch, finding it too soft. She eventually chose an analyst down the hall with a couch that was firm and sturdy. This patient told the first analyst that her couch felt too much like sinking into the lap of her suffocating mother.

I began this project in Buenos Aires when I went down with my friend Jim Dow for a few weeks. He had been photographing in Argentina for a number of years. We stayed with a friend of his who was an analyst. When I asked her if I could photograph her office, she immediately agreed and offered to set me up with several of her friends who were amenable to letting me record their consulting rooms. Once I got home, I continued the project here in the Boston area where there is a strong and thriving analytic community. I had received a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, which gave me the support and a free year to pursue this project and also gave me the credentials I needed to approach these people in the first place. Interestingly, I had been working with an analytically-inclined therapist for years so I had been primed for this project by the work we had been doing. I have also been fascinated by psychoanalysis for a long time, both in terms of how it has shaped the way we view ourselves and the way that it has influenced many artists over the last several decades. It has taken me forever to pull it together but I am finally getting to work on a book. I have a publisher who is interested and I have gathered most of the material so hopefully I will have something in the works soon. With any luck it might come out next spring.

JTD: You and I have had many conversations over the years about the changes you’ve seen in the art and photography worlds over the past several decades. Some of these are good, of course, such as the move towards a more equitable landscape in terms of gender and race, but other changes are perhaps not as good, such as the over-academicization of picture-making and the market’s sometimes overly heavy influence on artists. What are your thoughts about where we are now? What do you think we’ve lost or gained?

ST: Ahhh… changes in the art world. Where to begin. You are right… I am glad that it seems to be opening up to a wider group of people. This is a necessity in my view. I am actually really excited by all the wall art I see around the city… there is some spectacular work being done and it is there for all to view and anyone can do it. There is a little covered walkway in Central Square here in Cambridge where people spray paint stuff on the walls and it is constantly changing. I love it. The marketplace aspect of this business definitely puts me off. When I started out, no one was editioning their work. Part of what I loved about doing photography was that it was an inherently democratic medium. It was infinitely reproducible. My friends and I used to give away our pictures to anyone who wanted them, or we would trade them. If you were selling an image, you could charge something reasonable since there were no constraints on how many times you sold it. Now everything is editioned at such a low number. It’s something I’ve been battling for a long time. I finally relented and reduced my editions and immediately regretted it. I’m not sure it makes me any more “saleable,” and one or two of my favorite images are too low in number now. I don’t get it really. Prints are sold in large editions so why not photos? It’s all about people wanting something that no one else has, I think, and the art market has become another kind of investment opportunity. Rather than stocks and bonds, people invest in art. I so admired you and Vanessa when you made it a point to open up your To Survive on This Shore project to all sorts of venues. Not just galleries. I also like the fact that you have placed portfolios of this work in institutions where they can be studied. You have integrated your art with your advocacy in a beautiful way. I also have a problem with all the theory, which drives me crazy. I studied and came up under people who, in turn, studied with people like Minor White and Harry Callahan. Callahan, from what I’ve been told, was notoriously monosyllabic. What he cared about were the images. Not all the blather. Old school. If I had wanted to write, I would have become a writer. I believe in a division of labor. Art historians write about art, artists make it. That having been said, if one wants to write as a part of their artistic practice, then I’m all for it. Many of the photographers I know are beautiful writers. But I am definitely more into the poetics of writing, not so much the theory. Interestingly, though, I think artists make some of the best critics, so now I guess I may be going back on what I just said a little bit. Ha! I think this has something to do with the fact that, being visual, they tend to sidestep the theory and talk about the work from an artist’s point of view.  Sometimes I think academic artists, in talking about their own work, try to make up for bad images by writing obfuscating, incoherent nonsense about them. It may be that the need to theorize is much like limiting editions… it makes the work more inaccessible and therefore more exclusive and desirable on some level. It becomes a kind of class thing that seems to be encouraged in expensive and exclusionary graduate programs.

JTD: What projects are you currently working on? Looking ahead, what are you excited about?  

ST: This has been such a strange and difficult few years both personally and, of course, globally. It’s been a little hard for me to think straight, but that having been said, I feel like I am getting my feet back under me where they belong. I am working on pulling together the analytic book as I mentioned. I am also trying to archive and put my images in some kind of order. I shoot a lot and then the images sit around either in rolls (if they’re on film) or on various hard drives. It’s a mess, so I have some organizing to do. In a strange sort of way, it is helping me in terms of my next project, which I feel needs to be the family work. Like the Phantom Limb project, it underlies so much of what I have been thinking about over the course of the last several decades. I am also excited because I love books and I am thinking about this as an exhibition within two covers. I want it to be dense and complicated. Something that can be viewed over time with something new to discover every time you look at it. 

JTD: That sounds wonderful- I can’t wait to see it!