Zoe Strauss – Lecture and Book Signing

Saturday, February 18th, 2012
Lecture: 6:30
Book Signing: 7:30

The Philadelphia Photo Arts Center is pleased to host a lecture and book signing by Philadelphia-based photographer Zoe Strauss. Her photographs portray under represented and marginalized people and places within the Philadelphia area and abroad. These efforts have culminated in a portrait of the region and nation that is both honest and inquisitive, revealing the beauty of every day life and it’s consequences.

Zoe Strauss, born 1970, is an installation artist and photographer living and working in Philadelphia, PA. She recently completed her 10-year I-95 project that culminated in an installation of photographs under interstate 95 in South Philadelphia. Strauss has exhibited in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Philadelphia ICA and had two solo shows at Bruce Silverstein Gallery. In 2005, Ms. Strauss was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts and in 2007 she was awarded a USA Gund Fellowship. Her first monograph, America, was published in 2008. Her second book, 10 Years, was co- published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press earlier this year and will be available at the lecture and book signing.

 Charlie’s Bloody Ear, Christian Patterson

Of the Ordinary

February 9th- April 15th
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 9th 7-9pm
Gallery walkthrough with the artists: 6-7pm*
Book signings with Ron Jude, Christian Patterson & Ofer Wolberger: 7-7:30pm*
*Please note new times and dates

The Philadelphia Photo Arts Center is pleased to announce Of the Ordinary, a group exhibition including the work of Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Alyse Emdur, Ron Jude, Jason Lazarus, Christian Patterson and Ofer Wolberger.

At a time when photography itself is undergoing a tremendous transformation within popular culture and the art world alike, the act of appropriation has become imbued with a new kind of energy. With a galaxy of images circulating without boundaries, moving from one place to another, we can only speculate on what their final resting place(s), if any, may be. Each time the context of a photograph changes, whether it be a digital file or a physical print, the ways in which it is experienced, understood and reinterpreted will also adapt. The act of working with other people’s photographs, whether they are new, old, prints, digital files or otherwise, has been given a new relevance by the mitigating circumstances of contemporary life and image-making. This extends the mutability of meaning embedded within the medium itself and grants more permission to the viewer and author to generate new contexts and interpretations.

Of the Ordinary is comprised of imagery that was never intended to be experienced in the context of a gallery or museum.  The focus of this exhibition is an interest in the political implications of portraiture, highlighting the various ways in which images are created, distributed and experienced in a contemporary setting. Many of the projects highlighted in this exhibition employ the method of editing an existing body of images to further investigate their meaning.

A publication including images from each artist’s project will be produced in conjunction with this exhibition. It will be available for purchase at PPAC.

CONTACT:
Christopher Gianunzio
Exhibitions Coordinator
215 232.5678
christopher@philaphotoarts.org

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.

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.

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.