Receipt of Delivery: Ellen Zweig's She Travelled for the Landscape (Giant Camera)
Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.
“This piece was a long time ago, but was at a special time for me, a good time for my work. San Francisco was the breeding ground, the creative space, in which I could dream of Victorian ladies traveling around the world. The Giant Camera, which is constantly threatened with destruction, is a treasure, for photographers, artists, and for the general public. I’m happy to see it continues to survive. I hope anyone who reads this will visit the Camera and imagine my intrepid lady, who spent a day at the Cliff House in 1876.” —Ellen Zweig, email to author
“My fascination with lady travelers is that they essentially chose to live alone and surrounded themselves with people from other cultures, which was another way of being very alone. For them it was a way of getting rid of their culture, even though they brought it with them. Traveling is about looking, taking the stance of the observer, being an outsider.” —Ellen Zweig in conversation with Linda M. Montano, Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties: Sex, Food, Money/Fame, Ritual/Death, 2000