My High School Colors, 1976/2011   Victor Landweber is a conceptual artist and photo-grapher long associated with his work in Southern California in the 1970s. When Los Angeles photo-graphers were shedding conventional assumptions about photography and melding their practices with those of conceptual artists and painters, Landweber was both an avid practitioner and a leading advocate for new approaches to photographic art. My High School Colors is from the series Cherie Holding Colored Cards. For that project Landweber asked the model to hold selected 6×9 inch Color-aid cards against her nude body. She positioned the cards at her own discretion, and then—regardless of the angle at which Cherie was holding them—Landweber placed his camera so that the edges of the cards aligned with the edges of his photographs and filled approximately the same proportion of each frame. He selected nine or sixteen vertical photographs of each color and arranged them in grids for exhibition. My High School Colors demonstrates that rigidly conceptual photographs are hardly without visual interest. The red and white cards shimmer and bounce as one's eye scans the grid, and the interweaving body parts where the photographs meet form patterns as complex and formally lively as any geometric weaving.

—Eric Paddock    Companion to the Strauss Photography Collection    ISBN 978-0-914738-94-7, Denver Art Museum, 2014