Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 26, 1995 TAG: 9507260011
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Rusting motors, leaking boats, overgrown signs. The entrails of dead factories.
Knipe finds it lovely, mostly.
He concedes this may be a minority opinion.
"My feeling is, many people who haven't involved themselves in making art have a very circumscribed idea of what is beautiful," says Knipe.
Maybe so. Surely Knipe brings some authority to the subject.
A professor of art at Radford University, Knipe sprinkled references to the Dada movement of the early 20th century and to Marcel Duchamp - a French artist who once displayed a urinal as art - through a recent two-hour conversation about his work.
But where Duchamp at least sometimes claimed that ALL art is junk, Knipe makes the opposite claim.
Junk, he believes, may well be art.
"I'm interested in things that are toward the end of their useful cycle," Knipe said. "Things that in a sense have the patina of time or age."
Knipe, 53, was trained as a painter and sculptor. But it is as a photographer that he is making his mark as an artist.
His work has been included in dozens of exhibitions - including New River Art '95, which was held recently at Radford University's Flossie Martin Gallery.
Knipe's photograph, "Doors Against Tree," won the Purchase Award in the show - which means it will be bought for $300 and hung in a public location in the New River Valley. The location has not yet been announced.
Knipe's work also won an award of excellence at the 1994 Roanoke City Art show and an honorable mention at a national show in Joplin, Mo., in 1993.
One of his photographs is in the permanent collection of the Art Museum of Western Virginia.
Knipe works with a large format view camera - the big accordian-like camera of old that sits upon a tripod, behind which the photographer slumps with a black cloth over his head. The cloth is necessary to reduce glare enough for him to see through the camera's lenses, Knipe explained
Prints from the 8-by-10-inch negatives are produced by inserting negative and print paper together into a wooden frame that is then left in the sunlight for an hour or so.
The cumbersome procedure, Knipe says, not only produces beautiful black and white prints - but makes him feel a part of a historical tradition that stretches back to Mathew Brady, the famous photographer of the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln.
It also imposes some limitations. People seldom appear in Knipe photographs - because, given all the time it takes him to prepare to shoot, it is nearly impossible to take a photograph of a person that does not look posed, he said.
"There's just something methodical about this process that suits my temperament," Knipe said.
When he isn't teaching, Knipe cruises the Virginia back roads with his camera, looking for whatever strikes his fancy.
He confesses to a fascination with abandoned man-made objects - old machines, amusement parks, cars and signs half-reclaimed by nature.
In fact, one of the most beautiful pieces of sculpture he ever saw, Knipe said, was not strictly speaking art at all, but a turbine blade from a jet engine. The blade was on display at a travel agency.
Such machine-tooled sculptures exceed by far in precision - not to mention expense - anything a human sculptor could produce, Knipe noted.
So why does Knipe photograph man-made objects only AFTER they have been discarded?
"I think part of what makes [discarded objects] interesting to me is they've become enshrined by the passage of time," Knipe said. "The kind of surface patina you get on weathered wood and on weathered metal - in a sense they kind of go back to nature. Dust to dust."
Knipe views these deteriorating man-made objects as diamonds in the rough.
"Look at that," he says, pointing to a photograph of a denuded landscape littered with bits of machinery and other trash. In the foreground is the long white swath of a discarded industrial filter.
This entrances him. "It's almost like the passing of a imaginary brush stroke," Knipe says of the twisted fabric.
To Knipe, the cast-off products of a wealthy society have a significance that occasionally approaches the religious.
Take the long-closed drive-in theater in one of his photos - its sign half covered with underbrush.
"A drive-in theater is sort of a shrine for the automobile," the photographer believes.
So are carports - another Knipe photo topic.
"In poor cultures they would love to have the places to house their families in that we house our cars in," he said
Not all of Knipe's photos are meant to be seen as beautiful.
A kind of eco-warrior theme runs through several of his works - particularly those included in the 1993 exhibit, "Seeing the Elephant: The subject of the Civil War in contemporary art," at the Peninsula Fine Arts Center in Newport News.
In this series of photos, Knipe likens damage done to the Earth by industry to Civil War battlefield scenes of more than a century ago. A listing, graffiti-scrawled barge near Richmond echoes the famous ironclads, the Monitor and the Merrimac, for example - while a bare and noxious-looking patch of earth where a chemical plant once stood recalls those stark post-battle photos of pitted, ruined landscapes - and ruined men.
Not that Knipe really likes the soapbox.
"I'm not interested in preaching," the photographer said. "If I felt that strongly about it, I couldn't practice photography. I make my own chemical waste."
Besides, added Knipe, "I'd run out of stuff to photograph if they cleaned all that stuff up."
by CNB