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Bruce Conner
Edmund Shea
SOUND OF ONE HAND ANGEL, 1974

Artwork Info

Artwork title
SOUND OF ONE HAND ANGEL
Artist names
Bruce ConnerEdmund Shea
Date created
1974
Classification
photograph
Medium
gelatin silver print
Dimensions
87 3/4 × 41 1/4 × 2 3/4 in. (223.0 × 104.9 × 7.1 cm)
Date acquired
1982
Credit
Collection SFMOMA
Purchase
Copyright
© Conner Family Trust, San Francisco / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and Edmund Shea Trust
Permanent URL
https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/82.150
Artwork status
Not on view at this time.

Audio Stories

Conner illuminates this mysterious figure

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transcripts

BRUCE CONNER:  

This is SOUND OF ONE HAND ANGEL. The figure in this image is me. 

 

NARRATOR:  

Artist Bruce Conner. For decades, he famously refused to allow a recognizable photo to be taken of himself, but here we see a sort of self-portrait. It is one of a series of photograms, images that he made by casting his own shadow directly onto photo-sensitive paper.  

 

CONNER:  

Ezra Pound told me personally that know thyself was a trick, because nobody could know themselves. So taking that as advice, I figured: Well, Ill just do an exercise in — in trying to determine who I am.  

 

My initial idea was: Well, what — what is it that is me, that is like another piece? And I figured it was my shadow. My shadow would get longer and bigger, and sometimes there would be more of it, and it looked — always changing. It wasnt always stuck in the same place. So I asked Edmund Shea to do a large photogram of me on photographic paper. 

 

When we had the projector there, I could see some of this myself, but I couldnt see all of it. So I had to rely on Edmund to tell me… Id say, I wanna have my hand up here so you cant see my head. And perhaps just a little bit of this space where my hand is, at the shoulder. And once we had this all in position, and I put my hand flush up against the paper, so that it would be really white, then the light that could filter around me when the image was processed, would reveal this in the gray tonality, as if it were a shining light in itself.  

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