Oscar Bailey

Oscar Bailey (1925 – 2010) earned a B.A. in art from Wilmington College in Ohio in 1951 and shortly thereafter went to work for a commercial printer in Delaware, Ohio. Deciding to make photography his career, he then enrolled in the MFA program at Ohio University College in Buffalo, New York graduating in 1958 with a degree in photography. In 1969, Bailey came to USF to start their photography program until he retired in 1985. Oscar Bailey was an active participant in the early days of Graphicstudio, contributing his expertise to a number of projects including those of Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist.

Asheville, North Carolina and Tampa X 2 

Oscar Bailey's long, narrow photographs were made with a Cirkut camera, a device invented in 1915 to photograph vast panoramas and great groups of people. The camera rotates a full circle, and therefore photographs a little more than 350 degrees. The color negatives were contact-printed on Kodak Ektacolor 78F surface paper.

Bailey has said, "if you would set the photograph on edge and pull the two ends around until the buildings on each end (the same buildings) line up, you could see how the world actually looked. But when you lay it out flat, then you get the distortion." Bailey has used this distortion to create visual poetry in his Graphicstudio works Asheville, North Carolina and Tampa X 2.

 

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Printmaking Glossary

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Copyright + Reproduction

Images of the artwork are jointly owned by the artist and Graphicstudio. Reproduction of any kind including electronic media must be expressly approved by Graphicstudio.