EAC Intern Mary Wade interviews artist Stephen Guenther, focusing on his exhibition, Remnants.
Artist Stephen Guenther imbues his photographs with an intense nostalgia, one that is made explicit through the use of enlarged travel postcards. His series, Remnants, was on view in the upper-level gallery space at The Evanston Arts Center. The Evanston Art Center hosted Guenther for a conversation about his work on Thursday, October 23rd, 2025, one week before Remnants came down. Guenther’s enlargement of select details drawn from travel postcards allows viewers a new look at the familiar and often clichéd commercial image type. The postcard itself is intended as a miniaturized and savored capture of an ideal. We know that it is fallacious, yet we simultaneously allow ourselves to be comforted by it. Through the careful selection of singular details out of a larger image, Guenther brings new life to the found images of postcards coming from his parents’ collection, encouraging new curiosity and exploration to try to piece together what is unknown to us.
As Guenther enlarges his prints from small sections of the images from the postcard. With the enlargement process, a granular form lightly distorts and overlays the image. This is no simple passive by-product of the enlargement, but a facet of the process that Guenther became keenly interested in as a way to texturize the photo, adding an “abstract edge.” This works well in line with his process of selecting only a very small portion of the larger image and drawing attention towards it, as once apparently normal images now stand out for new visual properties. Another positive byproduct of the enlarging process is the small misregistrations, or misalignments of the colors, that can be found with a keen eye. Guenther approached these as adding something to the work, and left them in, saying, “This is a remnant of the full image; those are remnants of acceptable artifacts in the process.”
Some works in the series, for example, Beach Ball (2025) and Crane (2025), show details of recognizable and iconic forms that Guenther describes as being “very digestible as an iconic image, but there's more there.” These forms are impacted by the texturizing overlay of the dot pattern and are removed from any context or surrounding detail. Standing in the hallway across from Rocket, Guenther demonstrated how the images can take and lose their shape from different distances. Yet, even when we stand back and the shapes become less pixilated, we do not have their full context. For example, in Red Flags (2024), Guenther explains that this image was taken from the flags atop a pyramid of swimsuit-clad female water-skiers in the 1960s. Without Guenther’s anecdotal comment, a viewer would not be able to find this context based on the photograph alone. However, we are still aware that the cropping of this image results in a loss of context, as we are in all of his works, we just do not know what it is. I have found this to generate a growing curiosity, which has led me to meditate on my own relationship to these seemingly familiar forms.
Guenther also details how his works are created in response to the history of photography. Informed by the seminal minds of Stieglitz, Strand, and his academic lineage of Minor White and CJ Pressma, Guenther is constantly using his works as an intervention in the larger history. For example, Taos (2024) is of the Ranchos de Taos Church in New Mexico part of the historic district in New Mexico that has inspired photographers like Paul Strand and Ansel Adams and painters like Georgia O’Keeffe, who was married to Alfred Stieglitz, one of Guenther’s inspirations. The series is representative of that carefulness, as Guenther encourages his viewers to rethink the familiar.