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An artist who describes herself as “a painter drawn to the alchemy of the photographic process,”¹ Susan Rankaitis chemically attacks the surface of photographic papers, drawing from them a seductive variety of colors and sheens. In all her work, embedded information reveals itself only slowly, and only to the viewer who will give it detailed attention.

Though she was clearly drawn to photography in part through her husband Robbert Flick (by the mid-seventies a prominent figure) and his friends and contacts, Rankaitis’s work was utterly original. It made use of some of the techniques of chemical staining, solarization and so forth seen in Flick’s important LA Book of the Dead series, but left meaning more flexible and open to interpretation. Moreover, the painterly elegance in works by Rankaitis is entirely at odds with the crudely reportorial imagery of Flick’s work of the late 1960s.

Plato Image #1, 1977, is among Rankaitis’s earliest mature works in photography. Conceptually, it relates to her work as a graduate research assistant in “random access image processing” (on a project called “Plato”), which encouraged her to accept the multiplicity of connotations and implications crowding every nominally denotative image.

1. Quoted in an exhibition brochure essay by Greer Markle accompanying Susan Rankaitis: Photography Redefined, at the Schneider Museum of Art, Southern Oregon State College, Ashland, 26 October-30 November 1990. ↩︎