Oscar Bailey, 52 Years of Photography

The Penland Gallery is proud to present an exhibition spanning fifty-two years of work by Oscar Bailey, an inventive, imaginative, and skilled artist who lives in Yancey County. While most of the pieces are photographs, the show also includes kites, photographic objects, and a wooden marble roller. The show runs through December 9 with an opening reception on Friday, October 12, from 7:00-8:30 PM.

Bailey began making photographs in the early 1950s when he was working for a commercial printer in Delaware Ohio. In 1958, he earned an MFA in photography and began teaching at State University College in Buffalo, New York. He moved to Tampa, Florida in 1969 to start a photo program at the University of South Florida, where he taught until he and his wife, Sarah, retired to Yancey County in 1985. He also taught several times at Penland. Bailey’s work has been exhibited in solo shows at the International Museum of Photography (Rochester, NY), the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts (Michigan), Indiana University, the University of Colorado, and other venues.

Bailey has worked in different styles of photography using a variety of cameras and presentations. In addition to making many beautifully composed and printed conventional photographs, his work occasionally spilled over into sculpture, and the Penland show includes a photograph printed on a rock, a tool chest filled with images of tools printed on the wood, and other unconventional photographic objects. He also used several methods to create photographic collages.

Working in the days before pictures could be manipulated and combined using a computer, Bailey created startling combinations in the darkroom. He also made groups of overlapping pictures which he then mounted together to create larger images. He spent decades exploring the self-portrait, and the exhibition includes many images of Bailey himself, sometimes looking into the camera, sometimes reflected, sometimes as a shadow. What is consistent throughout his work is continuing experimentation and a sense of humor that’s never far below the surface.

Bailey’s most startling and inventive work was done with a panoramic camera made in 1915. Originally made to photograph large groups of people and vast landscapes, the Cirkut camera, driven by a complex, windup mechanism, rotates one direction while the film travels the other way at the same speed, producing a picture about five feet long that covers just over 360 degrees. The process of rendering a circular image on a flat plane can create amazing and puzzling distortions, and confuses the viewer’s idea of left and right, of beginning and ending. Rather than view these effects as a problem to be overcome, Bailey embraced them as a way of extending his photographic vision. He used the camera to turn the straight lines of urban landscapes into swooping arcs. He created multiple images of the same person by having them run ahead of the moving camera to be photographed again. He positioned figures so that, without moving, they would appear at both ends of the long photograph. The Penland show has many examples of his explorations in this unique format.

In addition to his wildly creative output as a photographer, the Penland exhibition includes several of Oscar’s large kites (or “wind-supported sculptures” as he has sometimes called them). Both Oscar and Sarah Bailey are expert kite flyers and excellent kite makers, and the Yancey County house where they have lived for the past twenty-two years is located just to the side of a wind-swept knoll. Someone else might have built on top of the hill for its spectacular view, but the Baileys preferred to leave it clear for kite flying.

The exhibition also includes a sculpture that directs marbles around and around a complex, wooden roller-coaster that incorporates spinners and other marble-activated devices. Carefully engineered and built, the piece is nicely representative of Oscar Bailey’s ability to engage seriously in both art and craft without ever appearing to take himself too seriously.

Self-portraits by Oscar Bailey