Show opening this Friday

I'm happy to be included in what looks to be a great show which is opening at Haverford College's Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery this Friday the 21st from 5:30-7:30. I'll be there so if you're in the Philly area please come by and say hello! Ten of my photographs will be up alongside work by Jessica Backhaus, Vita Litvak, Christian Patterson and Shen Wei. I'll also be giving a gallery talk along with Christian and Shen on Tuesday the 25th at 4:30.

The statement for the show really touches on many of the things I've thought about in terms of my own themes and interests so I'm going to copy much of it below for your reading pleasure. To see the entire write-up and for more information on directions, etc. go here.

In 1967 the Museum of Modern Art in New York unveiled a revolutionary show, New Documents, which heralded the arrival of a new photographic style, one that prized ordinary subjects captured in a snapshot-like fashion. The exhibition, which featured the works of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand, was organized by the late John Szarkowski, a man whose 2007 New York Times obituary called him “a curator who almost single-handedly elevated photography’s status in the last half-century to that of a fine art.” Szarkowski was moved by the intimacy and personal exploration of a new generation of photographic artists, writing in the text that accompanied New Documents that “(t)heir aim has been not to reform life, but to know it.” Today, almost 45 years after he wrote those words, their influence can still be felt.

Through the Plain Camera: Small and Shapely Pleasures in Contemporary Photography, which runs at Haverford’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery October 21 through December 11, gathers together some of the young voices in contemporary photography who are working from and grappling with Szarkowski’s legacy. In the show’s 36 images, we see intimate, unposed moments seemingly snapped from the daily lives of the photographers: a stain on a sofa, a bar of soap left on the sink, a perfectly wrapped package of Chinese noodle soup. These casually captured, private moments—most of which are devoid of human subjects—feel at once deeply personal and specific to the lives of the artists and yet also broadly universal and relatable to the viewers. They are lively and expressive, but also enigmatic.

Curated by Sarah Kaufman ’03 and Rebecca Robertson BMC ’00, both former students of Professor of Fine Arts William Earle Williams, Through the Plain Camera celebrates photographers who take pictures that describe and yet transcend everyday experience, suggesting something about the specific interior lives of these artists. Inspired by Szarkowsky’s writing, Kaufman and Robertson have gathered unconstructed, unmanipulated images, which represent direct photographic interaction with the world as it is, so that we may all look at their commonplace subjects with new eyes. “There are different kinds of responses that you can have looking at the world around you,” says Kaufman, who is a visiting assistant professor of art at Ursinus College. “I would hope that people looking at the show could take it back with them and start to think about what kinds of meanings their own experience can have.”

Here's the work artfully framed and wrapped by my fantastic better half...