Some Films 1997–2010
Judy Fiskin
May 3 to 31, 2025
Some Films is an installation of moving image works by the iconic Los Angeles-based artist, featuring Diary of a Midlife Crisis (1997), The End of Photography (2007) and Guided Tour (2010). This is Fiskin’s first exhibition in Canada, comprising a trio of seminal films made after she was unable to continue with her photographic practice.
Diary of a Midlife Crisis, 1997, 16 min
The first moving image work made by Fiskin is a serio-comic diary about a middle-aged photographer whose fear of moving the camera provides a metaphor for her feeling of being at a creative standstill. The video features a cat walking a tightrope, female Chinese acrobats and the voice of artist John Baldessari. The emotional climax comes with her first shaky pan. Diary of a Midlife Crisis is a meditation on art, aging, creativity and the difference between stillness and motion.
The End of Photography, 2007, 3 min
The End of Photography features anonymously photographed houses in the suburbs of Los Angeles, creating a melancholic elegy for the medium. The Super 8 film explores the concept of analogue photography’s potential obsolescence in a world increasingly dominated by digital images.
Guided Tour, 2010, 12 min
Guided Tour juxtaposes docent talks about art with images of artwork that have no relation to the discussion. The film explores the disconnect between language used to describe art and the visual experience of it, highlighting the inadequacy of all forms of description. It also touches on relationships between art and kitsch, and their sometimes confusing connection.
Judy Fiskin (b. Chicago IL) was raised in Los Angeles and graduated from Pomona College, where her classmates included Mowry Baden, Chris Burden and James Turrell. She received a master’s degree in art history at UCLA, compiled and edited the journals of Richard Neutra, was co-director of Womanspace Gallery and has taught photography and media at California Institute of the Arts since 1977. In addition to her photography and video, she’s also an award-winning writer for her essay “Borges, Stryker, Evans: The Sorrows of Representation.”
Since her first show at Castelli Graphics in New York in 1976, Fiskin’s photographs have had the same distinctive format: small black-and-white images, two-and-one-half-inches square, printed on letter-size white paper. She began with vernacular architecture in Los Angeles and gained critical attention for her “Dingbat” series, anonymous small 1950s LA apartment buildings shot from across the street in a deadpan style. Other series focused on desert scenes, military buildings and period furniture. In 1992, MOCA in Los Angeles held a mid-career retrospective; critics praised the intelligence, wit and stylistic coherence of her work. Her photographs have been exhibited widely, including Pompidou Center in Paris as part of their 2006 exhibit, “Los Angeles 1955–1985, Birth of an Art Capital,” and MOCA Los Angeles in the 2009–2010 “Collection: MOCA’s First 30 Years.” Her photos were shown at five Pacific Standard Time exhibitions in 2011 and 2012: “Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–81” at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; “In Focus: Los Angeles 1945–1980,” at J. Paul Getty Museum, “It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969–1973,” at Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont; “Seismic Shift: California Landscape Photography 1944–1984” at California Museum of Photography at UC Riverside and “Civic Virtue: The Impact of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and the Watts Towers Arts Center” at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. One of Fiskin’s photos was featured in the Los Angeles Times article “50 Masterpieces at LACMA” in 2015.
Fiskin began making moving image work in 1998 with Diary of a Midlife Crisis, a serio-comic diary about a middle-aged photographer whose fear of moving the camera provided a metaphor for her feeling of being at a creative standstill. Diary won awards at San Francisco International Film Festival and Worldfest Houston, and was screened at MOCA in Los Angeles, Bonn, Kassel and Brisbane, among other places. Critical acclaim led the J. Paul Getty Museum to commission the installation My Getty Center in 2000, another comic personal video diary chronicling the opening of the new Getty Center in Los Angeles. LACMA commissioned What We Think About When We Think About Ships, a video installation based on a painting in its collection.
50 Ways to Set the Table (2003) documented the competition in table setting at the Los Angeles County Fair—a metaphor for the creative process and the work of the critic. The video screened in Documentary Fortnight series at Museum of Modern Art in New York, South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Berkeley Film and Video Festival and Angles Gallery, Santa Monica. The End of Photography (2007), a three-minute elegy for the darkroom, was exhibited in Paris, Berlin, Kassel and Los Angeles at the Getty, LACMA, MOCA and Angles Gallery. Fiskin wrote “I made it at a time when it was becoming clear that digital photography was going to replace film photography both for the general public and for fine art photographers. It was also a personal sadness for me because in 1995 I had had to give up working in the darkroom and even many years later I still missed it. The video was shot on Super 8 film, which emphasizes the film itself, as it is very grainy. It was then transferred to video for editing and showing, but even on video, it looks like film. The subjects I chose to film were very similar to what I had always photographed: small houses, dingbat apartments and landscaping in typical LA neighborhoods, So in a sense I look at these as my last photographs.”
In Guided Tour (2010) the voices of two museum docents describe various works of high and low art. “By turns poetic and funny” Fiskin says, “the film is about the talk around art and the mute beauty of photography, the disconcerting ties between kitsch and art, and the ultimate inadequacy of all kinds of description.” Christopher Knight, art critic for the LA Times, called it “inspired…a surprising journey into your own conflicted assumptions about substance and significance.” Fiskin’s video I’ll Remember Mama was featured in the Hammer Museum Biennial, “Made in L.A. 2014.” An autobiographical account of loss and change, it is a meditation on the eventual passing of her mother—the objects that she will leave behind and the memories and knowledge that will disappear with her passing. As a part of “Made in LA 2014,” the Hammer also screened Fiskin’s “Art Talk Trilogy”—My Getty Center, 50 Ways to Set the Table and Guided Tour.