Mimi Plumb

Mimi Plumb, Bree, 1988, 61 x 51 cm, Silbergelatineabzug
Mimi Plumb, Highway 4, 1975, 51 x 61 cm, Silbergelatineabzug
Mimi Plumb, Mark in Terra Linda, 1976, 51 x 61 cm, Silbergelatineabzug
Mimi Plumb, Pearl, 1986, 51 x 61 cm, Silbergelatineabzug
Mimi Plumb, Pool, Fire above San Rafael, 1975, 51 x 61 cm, Silbergelatineabzug
Mimi Plumb, Two girls at the festival, 1975, 51 x 61 cm, Silbergelatineabzug
Mimi Plumb, White house, 1975, 51 x 61 cm, Silbergelatineabzug
Mimi Plumb, Tree on hill, 1976, 51 x 61 cm, Silbergelatineabzug
Mimi Plumb, 101 Movies, 1975, 51 x 61 cm, Silbergelatineabzug

“The White Sky” is the title of Mimi Plumb’s book of black-and-white photos published in 2020, in which she tells of growing up in California in the 1960s and 1970s. The predominantly dark mood in her photographs is hard to reconcile with what most of us probably associate with the “Golden State” during this period: lush nature, colourful hippie communities and social upheaval. Instead, Plumb’s images show us the featureless face of a small town with identical, unattractive terrace houses set in a bare, parched landscape. As a young girl, Mimi Plumb found the atmosphere in her home town of Walnut Creek above all oppressive, inhospitable and dominated with political ignorance. At the age of 19, she moved to nearby San Francisco to study photography. There, she found not only cultural and artistic inspiration, but also lively debates on current social problems – war, injustice, environmental destruction – which were challenged and reconsidered. In Walnut Creek, these discussions had not taken place outside her family.

Yet, from the mid-1970s, Plumb kept returning to her home town to confront the “suburban nightmare” of her youth through photography. The emptiness of the streets, the constant heat, and the partial devastation of the natural environment by raging fire – all these are depicted in her work. The consequences of climate change and the suddenly very real danger of a nuclear disaster in the early 1960s haunted Plumb as a child, often keeping her awake at night. She even found the light of the “white sky” foreboding. It penetrates her photographs with the relentless force of sun glare that was to be avoided at all costs. But her affectionate portraits of adolescents, smoking, laughing, and probably full of mischief as they staved off boredom on the streets, also recall a time when there was much opportunity to roam freely and try things out, unobserved by adults.

For decades, Plumb’s photographs from this period lay hidden in boxes under her bed. It was not until she stopped teaching after many years at San Jose State University in 2014 that she began to work through her own archive and make it public, above all in the form of books. She needed this time, she says, to view the pictures with new eyes. Her photographic work is at once extremely personal, highly political and impressively timeless. The issues that troubled her mind as a young woman are more topical today than ever.

 

Biographical information

1953

born in Berkeley, California and raised in the suburbs of San Francisco, USA

1976

graduates with Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from San Francisco Art institute

1985/86

receives the James D. Phelan Art Award in Photography from San Francisco Foundation

1986

graduates with Master of Fine Arts in Photography from San Francisco Art institute

2017

awarded the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship for her project “Teen Girls”, USA

2020

publishes “The White Sky” in London, UK

2022

received the Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography

lives in Berkeley, California, USA