Chinese Summerhall (1982, 1983, 1984)

Rauschenberg photographed extensively with color film during a 1982 sojourn in China. He used this material for his first and only project involving chromogenic prints. Rauschenberg worked with the University of South Florida’s Graphicstudio to produce a 100-foot long, 30-inch tall, color photograph printed on a single sheet of Kodak paper titled Chinese Summerhall (1982), cutting and collaging a selection of negatives for final image. Having used only a small portion of the photographs he captured for this work, he made a selection of twenty-eight additional images, the majority of which do not appear in the 100-foot print. These were printed in two portfolios, both titled Study for Chinese Summerhall (1983; one contains eighteen 40-by-30-inch prints and the other contains ten 24-by-20-inch prints). In 1984, he made five more photographic editions with Graphicstudio, each featuring an excerpt from the 100-foot print and titled Studies for Chinese Summerhall (1984).