Pa Bouje Ankò: Don’t Move Again by Laura Heyman
December 1st 2011-February 4th 2012
Visiting Artist Lecture:  Saturday, February 4th at 6:30

The Philadelphia Photo Arts Center is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition, Pa Bouje Ankò: Don’t Move Again by Laura Heyman.  For this ongoing project, Heyman travels to Port-au-Prince, Haiti and creates a roaming formal portrait studio. Heyman operates an outdoor photo studio in a particular neighborhood for a number of days before moving to another location. News circulates through advertisements or word of mouth that a photographer will open a studio in a specific neighborhood, and local community members make appointments to have their portraits made for free.  The project questions whether it is possible for a photographer to overcome the hierarchy between first-world photographer, third-world subject, and remote viewer.

Heyman loosely models her studio after the large number of portrait studios in Port-au-Prince, using a variety of backdrops, along with reflectors to control and augment the available light. The portraits created in these makeshift studios are designed to explicitly oppose the aesthetics of tourism, reportage and photojournalism.  The meaning of these images has changed after the earthquake, as they have become both record and memorial. That event also enlarged the focus of the project, which has evolved to include various rapidly expanding communities in Port-Au-Prince tied to reconstruction.

The project was initially proposed for the Ghetto Biennale, an event organized by the Haitian art collective Atis-Rezistans and British artist Leah Gordon which took place in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, from November to December of 2009.

Laura Heyman is an associate professor of photography in Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts. Her work has been exhibited at such venues as Ampersand International Arts, San Francisco, CA; Deutsches Polen-Institut, Darmstadt, Germany; Senko Studio, Viborg, Denmark; and The National Portrait Gallery, London, United Kingdom. Her most recent curatorial project, Who’s Afraid of America, featuring the work of Justyna Badach, Larry Clark, Cheryl Dunn, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Zoe Strauss and Tobin Yelland, was exhibited at Wonderland Art Space, in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The exhibition is here! Philly Photo Day was Friday, October 28th! Everyone in Philadelphia was invited to take a picture of anything they wanted within the city limits. Now it’s time for the big show! We have printed all of the nearly 900 photos we received and have them on display in our gallery space at well as the Nexus space down the hall from us at 1400 N. American St.

Photos by: Ashly Cabrera, Amy Wilson, Kit Heng Lau, Jonathan Scott Goldman, Lori Lipton, Edward Mchugh, Kelly Hennigan, Jill Sherman, and Joan Giampietro

Be sure to join us for the opening on November 10th from 6-9pm.  We will be holding a raffle, and all reprints of individual photos will be available to purchase for 25$ each. If you decide to become a member during the opening you will receive a free print of your choice(for all memberships over 50$).

Photo by Will Steacy

The Greater Area
September 6th – October 29th 2011
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 8th, 6:00-9:00 PM

The Philadelphia Photo Arts Center is excited to announce The Greater Area, an exhibition running from September 6th to October 29th with an opening reception on Thursday, September 8th from 6-9pm. The exhibition features the work of Gregory Halpern, Caitlin Teal Price and Will Steacy.

Greater Area is a term used to describe the reach of a city or metropolitan area. Borrowing the term, this exhibition draws upon physical, metaphorical, literal or imagined borders that exist within cities and their inhabitants. The Greater Area depicts contemporary cities as physical and psychological spaces fraught with solitude and caught in the midst of transformation.

The show also highlights photography’s unique capacity to transform the setting of the story, in this case the backdrop of the American city, into the focus of the work itself. The collected works utilize a variety of stylistic approaches that draw upon the histories of both landscape and
portraiture photography. The result is an exhibition that combines elements of the city that are simultaneously overlooked and ignored.

In his most recent series A, Gregory Halpern leads us through the poetically brilliant social landscape of the American rust belt. Intricately combining portraits of men with images of houses and other domestic spaces, Halpern juxtaposes masculinity, fragility and perseverance against the backdrop of one of America’s most overlooked regions.

In Annabelle, Annabelle, Caitlin Teal Price utilizes the severe and minimalistic landscape of the metropolitan city as a backdrop to construct her images of solitary women. The resulting images are meditations on age, isolation and the psychological power of the city. Juxtaposed with these photographs are images of blank spaces like highway overpasses and parking garages, further implicating the constructed landscape as a space brimming with uncertain potential.

Will Steacy’s most recent series Down These Mean Streets examines fear and abandonment residing within America’s inner cities. Utilizing the qualities of light found after dark, Steacy wanders through various regions, charting a route from the airport through the heart of the city in search of images. Leavened by a sense of loss and despair, his intentions are to create an accurate reflection of the American inner city that escapes a simple classification.

Photo by Jeff Beckly

A Love Supreme

June 9 – August 27, 2011
Opening Reception: June 9, 6 – 9 pm
Juror: Peter Barberie, Curator of Photographs, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Artists: Steven Beckly, Lisa Boughter, Andrew Burgh, Sebastian Collett, Gregory Davis, Gina Delia, Maureen Drennan, Emily Rooney, Daney Saylor

The Philadelphia Photo Arts Center is excited to announce A Love Supreme, 2nd Annual Contemporary Photography Exhibition. This year’s title refers to the dramatic transformation in John Coltrane’s creative process and sound in his legendary recording. Moving away from jazz standards to a spiritual and instinctual way of making music, Coltrane forever changed his
medium. In this spirit, today’s photographers are creating new visual languages, pushing the medium in unprecedented and unpredictable ways, forever changing how we define photography.

Photo by Mark Steinmetz

Exhibition: East of Eden

March 3rd – May 21st, 2011
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 10th, 2011, 6:00 – 9:00 PM
Curated by Sarah Stolfa and Christopher Gianunzio

The Philadelphia Photo Arts Center is excited to announce East of Eden, a spring exhibition running from March 3rd to May 21st, featuring the work of Doug DuBois, Amy Stein and Mark Steinmetz. East of Eden investigates contemporary America through the lens of John Steinbeck’s canonical novel. The exhibition draws upon themes of the west as a place for transformation and prosperity, familial relationships, America on the brink of change and the deterioration of the small town.

More than 58 years after its initial publication, the novel’s themes still resonate with great impact in a contemporary context. America itself has undergone tremendous shifts in the last few decades, similar to those in the novel. Rather than locate works that draw upon the time period staged in the novel, the photographs in the exhibition were all created within the last 20 years depicting a newer version of Steinbeck’s America fraught with parallel turbulence, doubt and uncertainty.

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Doug DuBois’ series All the Days and Nights documents his family over the course of the last few decades. The resulting images reverberate with emotional immediacy, providing a potent examination of family relations, and what it means to subject personal relationships to the unblinking eye of the camera. Each photograph is rich with color, nuanced gestures and glances enveloping the viewer in a multivalent, emotionally tense world. For East of Eden, selections of images of DuBois’ father from All the Days and Nights are exhibited.

For the Stranded series, Amy Stein has travelled the entire US by car to find people caught in-between freedom and survival at the side of the road. The resulting photographs describe a nation under duress and in transition. In many ways the work speaks to the ability to interact with strangers and also acts as a document regarding a very specific climate in American history.

While teaching in Knoxville, Tennessee from 1991 to 1992, Mark Steinmetz began photographing in the streets, neighborhoods and outskirts of the city. Drawn to subjects where transition is a recurrent theme, he portrays drifters, stray animals, kids and small by-the-roadside scenes that add to a heightened sense of turbulence. Steinmetz uses a 6X9 medium format camera to lushly describe his subjects in black and white.