Laura Hunt: Motorcycle Covers

September 14 - October 20

Ben Depp: Bayou’s End

April 5 - September 27

Bayou’s End, A Gallery for Fine Photography’s exhibition of photographs by Ben Depp, captures the rapidly changing landscape of Southern Louisiana from the birds-eye perspective of a motor-powered paraglider piloted by the artist himself. The incredible risk required to make these photographs is not always apparent in the images themselves; Depp must navigate changing wind conditions and avoid obstacles while not dropping his camera or being dropped himself, often while flying mere feet above the water’s surface. Depp’s photographs function as both documentary and fine art, contributing meaningfully to the ongoing dialogue on Louisiana’s wetland loss while simultaneously transcending this context.

Jerry Uelsmann: NOW

September 7 - September 30

20 hand made silver gelatin Photographs by Jerry Uelsmann.

Uelsmann uses up to 8 negatives and 8 enlargers to create his amazing images.

The photographs in this exhibit are all recently created 2015-2018.

Contemplating the View: American Landscape Photographs

September 8, 2018 - March 3, 2019

This exhibition highlights one of the Addison collection’s great strengths–images of the American landscape, both natural and manmade. Whether historical or contemporary, fact or fiction, abstract or representative, celebratory or critical, private exploration or social document, all of the photographs assembled in this exhibition comment to one degree or another on the overlapping and often contesting powers of culture and nature. The complex dialogue these images foster prods us to consider the contrast between our myths and realities. Featuring works by photographers such as Carleton Watkins, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Robert Adams, Lois Conner, Marcia Resnick, and Katherine Wolkoff, these photographs present more than mere description. As vehicles for artistic, personal, and cultural expression they challenge us to examine and reflect upon who we are.​

Jerry Birchfield: Asleep in the Dust

March 24 - September 23

Photography has a weighty history as an art medium and as a tool to record our daily lives. We tend to seek value in what pictures are of rather than in physical photographic objects. The work of Jerry Birchfield examines this tendency to privilege images using photography, sculpture, drawing and text. Jerry Birchfield: Asleep in the Dust highlights the artist’s iterative process through which he creates works of art that blur boundaries between image, object, subject and meaning.

Birchfield applies layers of darkroom processes to achieve untraditional gelatin silver prints. Unlike most printed photographs, Birchfield’s are unique, as each sheet of paper retains traces of physical acts performed in the darkroom. Camera-based film negatives are enlarged onto light-sensitive paper that is partially obstructed by other materials (the technique used to make photograms). Chemicals then develop the latent image and further stretch contrast, tone and texture, sometimes introducing or erasing major compositional elements. In these highly constructed photographs, meaning emerges as much from the process of their production as from the recognizable imagery they contain.

Slivers of visible images reveal dusty, debris-laden surfaces that were in fact created to be photographed. Every aspect of Birchfield’s work emerges from the isolated space of his studio, where scraps, detritus and unfinished works often reappear in new iterations of ideas. In some cases, photographs become sculptures—by encasing prints in plaster, Birchfield masks their images and warps the paper. Viewers are confronted by the space that the photograph and the surrounding plaster occupy, which corresponds to the dimensions of a photograph in a standard frame.

Anchoring the exhibition, a raised platform in the center of the gallery references the importance of the act of framing for Birchfield. Its structure incorporates rectangular horizontal sections that are covered in glass, referencing common picture frames. Like amateur actors, sculptures that appear to mimic everyday objects are assembled on the stage. Some of these sculptures were created for past projects; others were made from fragments of cast-off materials—they have emerged from the dust of Birchfield’s studio.

—Elizabeth M. Carney, Assistant Curator, Akron Art Museum

Jerry Birchfield: Asleep in the Dust is organized by the Akron Art Museum with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Ohio Arts Council.

Depth of Field: Acquisitions to UMBC’s Photography Collections, 2008-2018

August 29 - December 19

Depth of Field presents approximately one-hundred images acquired over the last ten years by UMBC’s Photography Collections through generous gifts from donors and artists. The photographs on view highlight the breadth and depth of the collection and illustrate the range of forms, technology, and artists that historically shaped the medium and are presently impacting its ongoing evolution. Featuring work by Albert Arthur Allen, Laurie Brown, Kristin Capp, Clarence Carvell, William Eggleston, Donna Ferrato, Robert Fichter, Todd Forsgren, Peggy Fox, Sally Gall, Ralph Gibson, Penny Harris, Sam Holden, Irina Ionesco, Walter Iooss, Lotte Jacobi, N. Jay Jaffee, Brian Jones, Nate Larson, David S. Lavine, Alen MacWeeney, Mary Ellen Mark, Fred McDarrah, Dorothy Norman, David Seltzer, David Seymour, Steve Szabo, Barbara Traub, Peter Turnley, and Robert VonSternberg.

Diane Arbus: Diane Arbus: A box of ten photographs

April 6, 2018 - January 27, 2019

In late 1969, Diane Arbus began to work on a portfolio. At the time of her death in 1971, she had completed the printing for eight known sets of A box of ten photographs, of a planned edition of fifty, only four of which she sold during her lifetime. Two were purchased by photographer Richard Avedon; another by artist Jasper Johns. A fourth was purchased by Bea Feitler, art director at Harper’s Bazaar, for whom Arbus added an eleventh photograph.

This exhibition traces the history of A box of ten photographs between 1969 and 1973, using the set that Arbus assembled for Feitler, which was acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) in 1986. The story is a crucial one because it was the portfolio that established the foundation for Arbus’s posthumous career, ushering in photography’s acceptance to the realm of “serious” art. After his encounter with Arbus and the portfolio, Philip Leider, then editor in chief of Artforum and a photography skeptic, admitted, “With Diane Arbus, one could find oneself interested in photography or not, but one could no longer. . . deny its status as art. . . . What changed everything was the portfolio itself.”

In May 1971, Arbus was the first photographer to be featured in Artforum, which also showcased her work on its cover. In June 1972, the portfolio was sent to Venice, where Arbus was the first photographer included in a Biennale, at that time the premiere international showcase for contemporary artists. SAAM organized the American contribution to the Biennale that year, thereby playing an important early role in Arbus’s legacy.

Trevor Paglen: Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen

June 21, 2018 - January 6, 2019

Trevor Paglen blurs the lines between art, science, and investigative journalism to construct unfamiliar and at times unsettling ways to see and interpret the world around us. Inspired by the landscape tradition, he captures the same horizon seen by American photographers Timothy O’Sullivan in the nineteenth century and Ansel Adams in the twentieth. Only in Paglen’s photographs is the infrastructure of surveillance also apparent—a classified military installation, a spy satellite, a tapped communications cable, a drone, an artificial intelligence (AI).

Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen is a mid-career survey, the first exhibition to present Paglen’s early photographic series alongside his recent sculptural objects and new work with AI. It carries on the long history of programs by the Smithsonian American Art Museum examining America’s changing relationship to the landscape. With this presentation, SAAM is contributing to the important and ongoing conversation about privacy and surveillance in contemporary society.

Paglen’s photographs show something we are not meant to see, whose concealment he regards as symptomatic of the historical moment we inhabit. His objects act in opposition to what his images have exposed, imagining another and potentially different world. Paglen is a conceptual artist with activist intentions. Helping to better see the particular moment we live in and producing spaces in which to envision alternative futures are among his chief concerns.

Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen is organized by John Jacob, SAAM’s McEvoy Family Curator for Photography, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

João Maria Gusmão, Pedro Paiva: WHERE THE SORCERER DOESN’T DARE TO STICK HIS NOSE and Another B&W Ghost Show

September 6 - October 20

Catherine Wagner: Selections

September 5 - October 6

RaMell Ross: South Country, AL (A Hale Country)

June 12, 2018 - June 21, 2108

Aperture is pleased to present an exhibition of photographs of the work of photographer and filmmaker RaMell Ross, as featured in Aperture magazine #231, “Film & Foto“, dedicated to exploring the influence of photography on leading filmmakers, and the role of cinema in the work of artists and photographers.
Having lived, worked, and photographed in Hale County, Alabama, for almost ten years, RaMell Ross has produced a series of quietly powerful photographs—South County, AL (A Hale County)—that meditate on the myths of blackness in the American South. “To be black is the greatest fiction of my life,” Ross says. “Yet I’m still bound to its myth. I can’t help but think about the myth’s childhood and its backyard of the South. How the myth of blackness aged into fact and grew into laws. How it evolved from there to become tacit, and join the secret order of things. How it became the dark matter of the American imagination.”
Ross’s recent experimental documentary film extends his photographic practice. Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018), which received a Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Award for Creative Vision, is composed of intimate and unencumbered moments of people in a community in Hale County, and offers an emotive impression of the Historic South. The film follows two young men: Daniel Collins attends college in search of opportunity, while Quincy Bryant becomes a father to an energetic son. Creating a poetic form that privileges the patiently observed interstices of their lives, Ross’s film trumpets the beauty of life and consequences of race, while simultaneously existing as a testament to dreaming, despite the odds.

Siân Davey, Janet Delaney, Joe Nishizawa: Refocus: A Collaboration between Aperture and WeTransfer

September 11 - September 26