Box 2

Scope and Contents From 1975-1977, Traube lived in an adobe house just south of Española, New Mexico. Behind the house were about 2 miles of hills and barrancas where he walked with his dog in the afternoons. After his dog died, he continued to walk on those hills, and one day he encountered extraordinary sandstone sculptured rocks on a hillside. There was nothing else like them on the hundreds of acres back there. On the Hills Behind My House is from these walks.

Scope and Contents There are only two photos in the series, one of Traube and the other of a former sweetheart for whom he was pining, repeated several times. The photos are presented, in sequence, as a Tic Tac Toe game. This series is accompanied by the words to the song, “It Had to Be You.”

Scope and Contents In the mid-1970s, Traube visited friends in New Orleans fairly regularly. During one visit, he photographed the sculptor Elizabeth Shannon at The Last Resort, a large mansion, on Esplanade, where she and several other artists lived. He also photographed a May Day celebration there. In the print series Slow Dance at the Last Resort, Traube to experimented with sequencing, repetition and movement when printing from negatives shot in New Orleans.

Scope and Contents In 1979, Traube was awarded a monthlong residency at Lightwork, a semiautonomous organization at Syracuse University. He used the color processing equipment at Lightwork to create this series of formally conceived diptychs.

Scope and Contents The series Blue Multiples was done in collaboration with the sculptor Blue McRight. Traube employed multiple windows and frames in rendering images of Blue’s marvelously athletic body in a series of nudes that is formal but not erotic.

Scope and Contents Starting in 1976, when he did “Letters to My Father,” Traube continued working with highly focused thematic groups of images. He also continued photographing whatever he happened to like. The many rolls of film he shot in this manner yielded a large stack of contact sheets that he examined from time to time and from which he paired into small diptychs. There is no unifying theme other than the pairing of “sympathetic” images. He has called works made this way “Alone Together” after a favorite...

Scope and Contents In 1982, Traube traded a print for Duke, a magnificent Black Labrador Retriever. Once when Traube was out photographing, Duke came and sat in front of the camera, and Duke became his new favorite model. The images in this group of work are yet again an exploration of form and juxtaposition.

Scope and Contents From the Series: The works in these series usually have been presented as diptychs, although there are some groups of work in this category that employ sequential images or multiple frames.