MATT DUCKLO
Touch Tour Pictures
Matt Ducklo is a photographer who captures a moment that is usually staged but in reality is an unusual element of an American institution: from the presentation of the news in TV studios to a new series of works that explore the “Touch Tour” - blind people touching works of art in museums.
In these new works his subject is the blind experiencing sculpture by touch. Looking at somebody experiencing something with a different sensibility, the photographs contemplate people, “in the act of seeing.”
This series includes photographs made in the Metropolitan Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC and for the Power House Memphis a commission to make new photographs at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art and Dixon Gallery and Gardens.
Matt Ducklo received a MA from the University of Tennessee in 1996; and his MFA in photography from Yale University in 1999. He currently lives and works in Queens, NY.
Artist Statement
I am interested in communication and what can be known by looking and how touching can function as seeing.
This project is about the limitations of art. A lot of my business in New York City is done in the area around 23rd street and Sixth Avenue. I buy film on 18th Street and have it processed on 22nd Street. I rent equipment on 21st and I print on 27th.
I began to notice a lot of blind people in the neighborhood before I realized that the Associated Blind Housing is located on 23rd between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. I don't recall ever encountering a blind person growing up in Memphis. I wondered if Manhattan was probably the best place in the United States for a blind person to live in part because most of the city is on the grid and public transportation is common and accessible.
About the time I noticed the Associated Blind, I was making pictures of local newscasters that were related to the sides of buses and the idea of looking for information. I began thinking of other kinds of ways to lead and I found myself making pictures of seeing-eye dogs and their owners, which lead to this current body of work.