Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts is set to present Photography: Before & After.
The exhibition features work by six photographers that explores the nature of photography by focusing on the medium’s changing issues in a digital age.
Photography: Before & After particularly looks at the time that goes into setting up a photograph before the “click” of the shutter and the effort that goes into managing the image afterward.
The exhibition presents six different case studies of how artists, all with ties to Princeton, negotiate these issues in their work. Exhibiting photographers are Princeton alumni Lily Healey and Carlos Jiménez Cahua, post-doctoral fellow Sara Sadri, faculty member Deana Lawson, Hodder Fellow Miko Veldkamp and Princeton resident Adam Ekberg.
Cahua graduated from Princeton in 2008 with a degree in chemistry and a certificate from the Program in Visual Arts. His recent photographs are singular, sculptural experiments in photographic cause and effect, with often-humorous consequences. Untitled #93 involved Cahua parking his car on four carefully placed sheets of photo paper and leaving them exposed to the elements for a week. Untitled #104 is a digital print of a rocky landscape that is assaulted by an adjacent carpet steamer for the duration of the exhibition.
Ekberg is an artist and graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who recently moved to the Princeton area. His photographs require the elaborate pre-arrangement of site-specific events that he matter-of-factly captures on camera. His ironically titled Bottlerocket shows only the smoke trail of the object in question that the photographer has just missed.
Healey is a 2013 Princeton graduate of the Department of Art and Archeology who concentrated in studio art. Healey is mesmerized with the virtual life and mutation of digital image files, elusive “things” that inhabit our devices and get moved around without ever being touched. This otherworldly air is evident in a series of photographs Healey made of trees on campus that she altered in Photoshop. The trees exist as recognizable subjects that have been eerily removed from reality.
Lawson is a full-time lecturer at Princeton and a recent Guggenheim Fellow whose new work entails photographing cities in the American South and the African continent that were previously involved in the slave trade, aided by research funding from the Lewis Center. For Lawson, photographs begin with specific people in specific places but do not become art until after a rigorous editing process. Lawson has agreed to share how she “thinks through” her images as her contribution to the show, including several new, large-format prints.
Sadri was a post-doctoral fellow in the School of Engineering and Applied Science last year, where one of her research photographs won top prize in the school’s “Art of Science” competition cosponsored by the Lewis Center. Trained as a hydro-engineer, the subject of Sadri’s images can take moments or centuries to form the patterns that she captures through her lens. Like Cahua, Sadri is a trained scientist who has chosen the path of full-time artist and moved to Hollywood, where she hopes to make a career as a scientific documentary filmmaker.
Veldkamp is a painter currently living in Amsterdam and a 2014-15 Hodder Fellow, the first studio artist to win this distinguished award. Veldkamp is consumed with digital culture and his paintings are a direct response to its speed and pervasiveness. Veldkamp questions what painting can do in the face of such relentless image production, which he answers by proceeding as if painting can compete with photography as a means to commemorate special moments or the everyday.
Photography: Before & After is set to run Sept. 17 through Oct. 4 at the Lucas Gallery at 185 Nassau Street. An opening reception is scheduled for 5:30 to 7 p.m. Sept 17 .
The Lucas Gallery is open weekdays from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. For this exhibition the gallery is also set to be open Sept. 20, 27 and Oct. 4 from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
More information is online at arts.princeton.edu.
Bottlerocket by Princeton resident Adam Ekberg.,
