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Robert Fichter was a mature artist even before he came to Los Angeles in 1968. Invited by Robert Heinecken to teach at UCLA, he stayed only until 1972, with a Visiting Professor stint in 1976. Still, Fichter became a central figure in the group of artists who identified themselves as photographers, yet longed to expand the conceptual and material boundaries of that medium.

Fichter seemed to know everybody. He was the link to the country’s most vital museum program in photography at the time, the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, where he had served as Assistant Curator of Exhibitions (1966-1968). The combination of his own prodigious intellect, good humor and freewheeling artistic attitudes with his many photographic art contacts nationwide attracted a following that included Ellen Brooks, Robbert Flick, Stan Mock, Michael Stone and others. He also established strong ties to peers like Heinecken, Darryl Curran and Todd Walker (who was “discovered” by Heinecken and Fichter). His studio and home in Culver City were meeting grounds where curatorial visitors like Nathan Lyons might be introduced to local artists, or where artists from other LA circles, like Jerry McMillan or Walker, could make contact with the UCLA crowd.

Though atypical of Fichter’s work in its overall patterning (he tends toward narrative, even illustrative, free association), Photo Info #2, 1973, is a superb example of some of his themes. Above all, it is a handmade object much closer to a fine art print than a traditional photograph. At the same time, though, as with so much of his work, photography is its central subject.

In a characteristically ingenious and perverse Fichterly move, he has made in Photo Info a work that is both a painting and a photograph at the same time. The obvious brushmarks—at first apparently daubs of paint—are the result of a purposely careless application of photographic emulsions to plain paper. Examination of the color brushstrokes barely reveals smidgens of photographic content-the sensitized paper has been exposed to light through one or more negatives and processed. None of the “info” in the sensitized areas is in the least decipherable as information, however, if by that word we mean a recognizable description of some fact or circumstance. We are presented, not with a photographically described fact, but simply with the fact of something photographic—we see the syntax without reference to the subject.