A Summer of Photography
July 8 – August 20, 2010
547 West 27th Street, Suite 200
New York, New York 10001
www.flomenhaftgallery.com
The Center for Alternative Photography’s former Workshop Director Keliy Anderson-Staley features wet plate collodion tintypes alongside photographers Carrie Mae Weems, Neil Folberg, Builder Levy, and Rimma & Valeriy Gerlovina in a group exhibit.
Rocca
Keliy’s featured series of portraits seeks to raise questions about the ways photography has shaped our conceptions of identity since its earliest days. Her interest lies in finding the unique visual markers of personality and in portraying faces that reflect the diversity of contemporary America. She uses the nineteenth-century wet plate collodion photographic process, the same photo process that was used when many believed that photography could scientifically record and catalogue the racial or ethnic identity of a person. Like the photographers of the 1850s, she uses hand-poured chemistry that she mixes herself, brass lenses, and wooden view cameras to expose positive images directly onto blackened metal and glass. Anderson-Staley explores the way individuals resist easy categorization.
In contrast to Keliy Anderson-Staley’s series which actually points up the use of photography to categorize people, Carrie Mae Weems’ work in the exhibit “Blue Black Boy”, “Chocolate Colored Man”, and “High Yella Girl” hold up a mirror to the beauty of black people’s multiplicity. K. From the late 1988 to early 1990 Weems created a series entitled Colored People which celebrated the range of skin color hidden behind the term “black.” The triptychs and single image from this series portray the terms the African American community has used to create its own hierarchies by way of color. In the triptychs she uses minimalism’s formal repetitions and the ‘front and side mug shot’ she says, “to better trap the miscreant.”
Neil Folberg’s photographs from the “Celestial Nights,” a series of starry night landscapes with a cosmic outlook set in ancient ruins and scenes of the Middle East. This work was collected in the book, Celestial Nights: Visions of an Ancient Land (Aperture Press, New York 2001), winner of the New York Book Show Prize, First Place Photography, 2002. He was later commissioned to follow in the footsteps of the Impressionist artists and create a photographic view that captures their inspirations. Folberg there discovered a community of artists linked to one another in concept, friendship and discord, and he met and photographed some of their descendants. The Impressionist paintings provided a fount of inspiration and he realized that they had been created in a spirit of what photography would later become but had not yet attained. He looked at modern France through the Impressionists’ eyes and attempted to integrate their visions with his own in a manner both lighthearted and serious.
The engaging images of the Gerlovins are ‘still performances’ that briefly sum up certain trends in their art and closely link to the whole sequence of what they call their life’s ‘perhappenings.’ They are their thoughts that became visible shown through allegoric games that transport the viewer into a theatre of consciousness. The Gerlovins feel that creativity in general is an extension of the inner qualities of an artist and they exist in all that exists. Therefore, their photographs which convey a mood are not portraits. They are not models but modules used for personification of different stages of psychological and visionary experience. Their roles are of the observers and the observed and are extended into the unifying state of being the observatory itself.
Center for Alternative Photography
Center for Alternative Photography
