To E. Brady Robinson, you are just your Rolodex.
And your coffee mug. Your tape dispenser. Your page-a-day calendar.
In January, while waiting to photograph head shots for an annual report by the CuDC, a local arts nonprofit, Robinson noticed a private workspace in a back room at Flashpoint Gallery.
An ordinary assortment of stuff — glue sticks, a half-eaten box of gourmet crackers — sat on a steel desk belonging to Karyn Miller, director of visual arts at the gallery.
The mundane scene piqued Robinson’s interest. That space, neither shocking nor glamorous, anchored the contents of one woman’s career. For Robinson, that was enough to warrant a photograph.
Robinson, 41, an exhibiting photographer and professor of visual arts at the University of Central Florida, had seen her share of office supplies. Still, she felt like a snoop, both guilty and electrified, examining the highlighters as though they were a stash of Oxycodone in a neighbor’s medicine cabinet. Fueled by voyeuristic impulses, she snapped a few shots of the desk and then tended to her commissioned head shots. The chance to shoot other desks wouldn’t emerge until months later, when this unexpected form of still-life portraiture would lead her through a maze of Washington arts players.
“As a photographer, one image can lead to a whole new body of work,” said Robinson, sitting in her Northeast apartment, which doubles as her studio. In her case, snapping Miller’s desk led to a new photographic series, an international exhibition and access to Washington’s close-knit arts community. What started as a social experiment in June, a quaint “six-degrees-of-separation study,” became “Desks as Portraits: An Inside Look at the D.C. Art World.” In November, the series will debut in Lishui, China. Robinson will be among more than 30 international artists at the Lishui Photography Festival, where this year’s theme is “American Life.”
Funny, don’t desks keep Washingtonians from having a life?
We’re the city of desk jobs, news desks, “what desk are you on at State?” cocktail party small talk. Desk portraiture seems an eerily accurate depiction of Washington living. But Robinson excludes the usual bureaucrats. For her, the buck stops at the arts desk.
The artist as a desk fan
There are checks to be signed and translucent file cabinets sitting on the collector’s desk.
A dictionary and a reporter’s nameplate decorate the cubicle of the art critic.
The tech-savvy art lover let her cat Louie linger behind her lime-green MacBook.
The art dealer’s walls are sparse, spare spattering on three canvases by the same painter.
It’s telling that Robinson crafted the project not as social commentary but to help her seep into a new social network. Last year, she moved from Orlando to Washington for family obligations. Although she still teaches online courses at UCF, she wanted to start a project that would introduce her to all kinds of D.C. art lovers.
She contacted self-described arts connector Philippa Hughes shortly after photographing Miller’s desk. Hughes, the founder of the Pink Line Project, helped Robinson make a list of Washington arts notables, and within 24 hours, Robinson had invitations to photograph the desks of Anne Goodyear at the National Portrait Gallery, arts collector James Alefantis and Andy Grundberg at the Corcoran College of Art and Design. The immediate, positive response stunned Robinson.
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