Tanya Marcuse’s new oversized book Ink, is a beautiful cacophony of form and symbolism.

One summer in Maine, photographer Tanya Marcuse’s son insisted they try nocturnal squid fishing. Moved by the uncanny spontaneity of the experience, Marcuse – who normally makes slow-process large format photographs – pulled out her iPhone and embarked on an unexpected series and way of seeing.

She began making similarly fleeting yet intricately crafted photos of squid spilling its ink across story titles, fashion advertisements, and marriage announcements. In each photograph, the squid, ink and newsprint become a painted, Rorschachy mess that pushes viewers to conjure their own relationships between ink and image, gesture and surface, headline and tentacle.

Marcuse’s images are both alluring and disquieting. These tableau-like still-life compositions reminds us of her background as a large-format photographer, and her iPhone brings a freeing informality to how she organizes form and space. Now a large-scale book (and limited edition folio, if you fancy) published by Fall Line Press, Ink takes on a new layer of tactility from its once digital-only existence – photos you want to hold and handle as you attempt to figure out their mystery. I spoke with Marcuse to learn more about her process and the story behind it.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Tanya Marcuse

Jon Feinstein: One of the first things you describe about this new work is its departure from the large scale, elaborate formalism of your other work - and the fact that it was all shot on an iPhone. Why is this important to you and can you talk a bit about your decision to work this way?

Tanya Marcuse: I can’t resist noting that Ink was made with my iPhone. I began the project in 2012 and back then this application of the phone camera was surprising. Most phone camera images remained files without ever becoming a physical print object. I had been exclusively working with a view camera since 1991, so using this new tool felt revelatory, freeing, and opened up smaller scale projects that I pursued alongside the larger longer series that were unfolding (Fruitless | Fallen | Woven).

Feinstein: There's a fleeting-ness to it…

Marcuse: The fleetingness was alluring --at once mirroring the ephemerality of the subject and creating tension between the casual nature of the phone and the strangeness and formality of the subject.

Feinstein: Yet, at the same time, this work feels incredibly formal, intentional and in many ways, just as intentioned and elaborate…

Marcuse: It’s true that there’s an elaborate density to the tangle of tentacles, to the layers of image, text, ink, and squid that echo the intricate tableaux of Fallen and Woven. Yet the process and the printing are quite distinct: minutes/hours to make an Ink photograph, versus weeks or months for a single Woven piece; Ink prints are an intimate 7 x 9 inches (the size they are reproduced in the book) while Woven are an immersive 5 x 10 feet.

Two images from Tanya Marcuse’s series Fallen — Two images from Tanya Marcuse’s series *Fallen*

An image from Tanya Marcuse’s series Woven — An image from Tanya Marcuse’s series *Woven*

However different in process and scale, I agree that intention and formality are a consistent part of my language. For me, intention does not mean a predetermined outcome. Accident can be intended, and is, in fact, a key ingredient in Ink.

Feinstein: I understand this series was inspired by your son "insistently" trying out nocturnal squid fishing in Maine.... can you tell me a bit more about the story behind this and how it evolved into a comprehensive body of work?

Marcuse: I’ll never forget when my son Jonah pulled up his first squid - holding onto his rod and running in both triumph and horror at the creature, both magical and terrible, clinging onto his jig. It was 2012 on the beloved island of Vinalhaven, Maine, where I’ve been visiting my whole life. Jonah was 9. My husband, James Romm, is a great classicist and philologue; he’s also a passionate fisherman, so our family trips always involved fishing.

A week or so before, a boy around Jonah’s age had shared his squid jig, and gave Jonah some tips on how to drop the jig into the dark water and raise it up slowly. It had grown a little tedious going with Jonah, night after night, (getting creamed by the mosquitos) trying for squid to no avail, so I think we were all incredulous that he caught one.

“Looking for squid by the lobster docks. Jonah caught just one. The seals chased them away.”

Feinstein: How did the New York Times come into play as a backdrop for it all?

Marcuse: In the light of day Jonah and Jamie were cleaning the squid on the Sunday NY Times. I watched the black squid ink ooze out over marriage announcements and Prada ads. The eyes of squid, however dead, seemed to be looking out with an uncanny gaze. Captivated, I thought about getting my view camera, but took pictures with my phone instead. Jonah’s older sisters, Eve (who designed the book) and Abby, joined in and we all kept catching squid and I continued to photograph their ritual cleaning.

Back home I printed the photographs and that’s when I felt that the work was the beginning of a project worth pursuing. I found a source of uncleaned squid (harder than you might imagine) so that I could continue working. Over a few years the body of work took shape.

Feinstein: At what point did you start seeing it as a book?

Marcuse: It wasn’t until later that I began to envision the project as a book. Bill Boling, the publisher of Fall Line Press, visited my studio in 2018and a stack of the Ink prints caught his eye. “Let’s do this book,” he said. We’ve had a rich dialogue as the book evolved from a small-scale minimalist hardcover to the opulent oversized softcover it became.

Feinstein: This may sound obvious, but in each piece, the squid+ink, their gestures, movement, etc seems to directly respond to the text and images on the newspaper pages. Can you talk a bit about your process in creating these call+response images?

Marcuse: Your phrase “call and response” is just right. The process was whimsical, intuitive, sensing possibility in a headline or image. I played with the placement of squid bodies, but the ink was hard to control. The inky wetness might reveal the text on the verso or obscure things I hadn’t planned on covering. I thought of Rorschach blots and the energized gestures of NY School ab-ex painting. The bodies and marks of the squid seemed to create a new layer of space (and time?) sitting in front of the newspaper page, but also integrating with and sinking into it.

Feinstein: You describe the squid and newspaper, being about “fact and tangle.” This makes so much sense to me, and is quite beautiful. Were you thinking about these ideas from the outset or did the metaphors develop as the work developed?

Marcuse: I was initially struck by the simple uncanny confluence of newspaper fact and primordial ooze, but as the work unfolded that relationship became more complex and less obvious. Over time, the squid became more and more lyrical to me, and less grotesque. I got more and more interested in the ink with and without the squid’s bodies, the way the bodies of the squid and their ink could “draw” with a kind of intention and gesture, both obscuring and elucidating the newspaper images and text.

I loved the interplay between the abstraction of the black ink leaking from an uncanny underwater creature and the pages of the NY Times with its own collision of image and text, reportage, and advertising. I’ve always found the physicality and design of the NY Times incredibly seductive; the beautiful font, half-tone and CMYK dots, etc.

Feinstein: Yes it’s really wonderful…

Marcuse: More than anything I was compelled by the power of the squid + ink to transform the quotidian plane of the newspaper, turning headlines and ads into enigmatic poetic fragments.

To the extent that I see the photography as a chance to transform the meaning of a slice of time and place, I saw the squid doing something like that to the newspaper.

Feinstein: A question for your daughter Eve, who I understand worked on the design of the book. Seeing the book in person, I also feel parallels to the oversized, non-traditional, elevated yet magazine-like softcover printing... Can you tell me a bit about your thought process and conceptual underpinnings, and decision to design/print this way?

Eve: The relationship of the book’s format to the newspaper or broadside form was very intentional. The squid illustration and text passages in the book come from a 16th century broadside which reported, in rather sensationalized form, a giant squid which washed up in Antwerp. That document is part of a whole genre of widely distributed “miracle broadsides,” which reported on everything from astrological occurrences to the births of deformed livestock. They often contained both an illustration and a moralizing interpretation which presented these strange events as portents, warnings, or moral rebukes.

I think this broadside is a fascinating intertext with which to read the Ink photographs, which also juxtapose the bizarre and the everyday, the vernacular and the miraculous, hinting at some sense of moral meaning which remains just out of reach.

Feinstein: Back to Tanya, the book opens with the quote "the workes of God, how great and straunge they be a picture plaine behold here may you see…” Tell me about this…

Marcuse: The quote welcomes the reader into the weird universe of the pictures with obvious moral and religious overtones. I love that it refers specifically to the “picture plaine” since it suggests the language of photographs.

A book is a chance to elucidate, suggest and play with the themes of the work. It was a watershed moment when Eve and I discovered the 16th century broadside and began working with it as the visual and moral frame for the photographs. The black pages featuring silver on black text and black on black graphics that open and close the book form the visual and moral frame for the photographs.

Feinstein: You also mention "broadside’s sense of moral warning and impending apocalypse" - my first and maybe obvious jump is to the feeling of apocalyptic-ness in our world right now.... can you talk a bit more about where this sits for you?

Marcuse: I made these photographs between 2012-2014. Pre-pandemic, pre-Trump, and other nightmares. It’s hard to believe that back then I had such a strong sense of catastrophe and apocalypse (maybe it’s a sensibility, disposition). I see moral and environmental caution in the photographs that the broadside elucidates. No dates are visible or obvious. But many clues tie them to time and place: The Life of Pi, a tiny floating Red Bull logo is perceptible in an otherwise near abstract image of clouds, the bodies of squid are draped over an image of downtown Manhattan flooded from hurricane sandy. “How Mary Feels About Being a Virgin” is the centerfold.

Perhaps it’s a cliché, but I’ve always been drawn to the possibility of finding a rich uncanny beauty in ruin and death. The descriptive --specificity loving-- nature of both the medium of photography and the newspaper help to restrain these leanings.

And not to totally contradict myself, but I think there’s also a playful dark humor here too --like a campy “Dawn of the Dead '' with the squid overtaking plebeian concerns.

Feinstein: Thanks so much for your time. Wrapping things up, I want to get back to the title. "Ink," in its most obvious form, is about squid ink, but of course there’s more too it.....can you talk a bit about the deeper metaphor at play?

Marcuse: I love titles that are direct but also suggestive of multiple meanings. Ink refers at once to squid and newspaper ink, but I also think of pigment print ink, as well as offset ink.

The effectiveness of the book hinged on conveying the inky blackness and physicality of wet newsprint and creating a kinky luster to the opening and closing black on black pages. I usually go on press for my books, but with the pandemic raging that wasn’t possible. I’m so grateful to Jose Caballé at SYL in Barcelona for nailing it.

Poetic Photographs Of Squid Ink Oozing Onto Pages of The NY Times