# data[].attributes.body
imovie

premier

trisha donaley

art forum: los angeles

# data[].attributes.body
I currently have been going through a very stressful time in my life. I have recently changed jobs, and started anew else where and it has emotionally drained me. I am just begging to feel like myself again and have some museums scheduled to dive back into my research.

# data[].attributes.body
I enjoy this composition as well.

# data[].attributes.body
one of my favorite image

# data[].attributes.body
I tend to favor canid unposed moments

# data[].attributes.body
I also have some images that I have taken where I only want to capture and record. I still feel a little lost in my voice as a photographer. And would like to stay exploring , but I do wonder what stories my images tell to the viewer.

# data[].attributes.body
I think what caught my eye the most in this image is the contrast and detail. The dark archway and clouds are in perfect balance. Knowing that when this artist took photos it was unkown until development if the image came out is important to me because it makes photography magical. I have been trying my best to make sure that I also leave some of my images to the magic by not double checking each photo and just enjoy the surprise when they upload into my computer.

For the shows I have been seeing I have been focusing on viewing photography based artist.

** one interesting interactive element was a digital screen that allowed the viewer to flip through a very old album that was on display, made me curious to how photographer artist show their work without overwhelming the viewer.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Installation view of "Heij Shin," 2018-19, at Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland.ANNIK WETTER

Among last year's most memorable shows in New York was Heji Shin 's exhibition of new photographs at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, which stuck with me in a way few others have. One reason was the work's subject matter: muscular men, some dressed as cops, posing nude and dispassionately copulating, often in close-up shots where Shin essentially begs viewers to pore over their perfectly sculpted bodies. (In some images, the policemen hold flashlights up to one another, suggesting a fetish for surveillance technology.) Another reason was the style of the works: a certain steeliness that recalls bad porn or so-so fashion advertising that is not often seen in galleries.

On a recent overcast Friday afternoon at a coffee shop in New York, where she is based, Shin said that the photos had not gone over well with some in the fashion industry, where she sometimes works. "It was too provocative, first of all, and second of all, it didn't look that great," she said. "It wasn't that sophisticated." Shock, though, has never been a problem for Shin, whose photographic subjects have included close-ups of childbirth, monkeys licking dildos, and pixelated images of millennials having sex (an advertising campaign for the fashion line Eckhaus Latta). "I don't admire good manners or the 'right' political views in art," she said. "I admire courage."

Heji Shin, Kanye I, 2018.COURTESY THE ARTIST

Shin's willingness to provoke has reached a new height with her exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zurich. Many of the works in that show are large-scale portraits of the rapper Kanye West, whose incendiary statements-that slavery was a choice for African-Americans, for one-have earned widespread condemnation. Shin said that she knew taking West's picture was a risk. "I don't feel threatened," Shin said. "Someone can criticize me for anything. I'm totally good."

And Shin did, indeed, seem relaxed the day we met. She arrived punctually by bike, wearing a knitted beige sweater and fashionable jeans, and smiling and sipping tea while offering a variety of thorny opinions. She doesn't care for artists who are too one-sided in their ideologies, like Adrian Piper, she said. She doesn't like Hollywood films that commodify politics and package it in neat ways. She thinks N.W.A. deserves more critical attention for its songs about police violence. She is sure that all art is fundamentally about power and is therefore, by its very nature, "problematic" (a word she does not like).

The West photographs, Shin said, are an attempt to peel back the musician's celebrity and reveal him as a person, but the circumstances of the works presented a challenge. On a lark, she had emailed West, asking to photograph him, and much to her surprise, he agreed. She met up with him in Chicago and photographed him. Feeling not entirely satisfied with the pictures she'd taken, Shin traveled to Uganda to photograph him again. At the time, West and his wife, Kim Kardashian West, were touring the country, and he continued blowing off Shin, who repeatedly arranged shoots. (One image by Shin from that trip shows West's daughter, North, perched atop his shoulders made it into the Kunsthalle Zurich show.) After hounding him by text and email for a month and a half, she finally got him into a Los Angeles photo studio-which wasn't entirely a successful venture. "I tried to direct him, and he doesn't like to be directed, especially not by me," she said. "It was over pretty fast."

Heji Shin, XRays, 2018.COURTESY THE ARTIST

The shoot lasted a mere 10 minutes, and all the jetting between cities to arrange the various shoots cost West a fortune. "I was like, What the fuck? Why?" Shin said. "I told him, too, that that is actually not OK. He wasted so much money in this time. We set up so many shoots with him, and he always canceled. He spent $30,000 for nothing."

The resulting works are huge, imposing portraits in which West looms over viewers. The backgrounds are garish shades of pink, mustard yellow, and Chroma Key Blue-colors that Shin said allude loosely to Andy Warhol's paintings. "I even showed Kanye the silkscreens," Shin said. "I wanted to do the same photo over and over again, with the same lighting-actually, to take the idea of Warhol's silkscreens and reverse them into photography, because he had done it the other way around."

In distinct contrast to imposing size and provocativeness of the West photos, the Kunsthalle Zurich show also includes small X-ray images that feature Shin holding expensive lap dogs, with all of their bones visible. For Shin, these X-ray photographs were meant to suggest to the viewer that "maybe what you see is not what you get."

"Even if you see or penetrate something, it doesn't mean that you get it," Shin went on. "Even if you can see through me, you can understand even less of what's going on."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'I Don't Admire Good Manners': Photographer Heji Shin on Shooting Kanye West, X-Rays, and Power

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Getting the rapper to make time for a portrait session was an ordeal.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Full press release
52 Walker is pleased to announce its eighth exhibition, THE BIG NUDES, which will feature the work of New York-based artist Heji Shin (b. 1976). Throughout her photographic practice, Shin has skirted the boundaries of convention, creating images that challenge judgments of taste vis-à-vis fashion, celebrity, and sexuality. This will be her first solo exhibition in New York since 2020.

Shin's practice oscillates fluidly between the commercial and fine-art realms, and the work she exhibits in gallery and museum contexts is strongly influenced by the editorial work she produces. Shin often shoots her varied subjects at close range and employs the vernacular of fashion photography, in which lighting and display are paramount in drawing attention to covetable merchandise. Revealing our scopophilic tendencies while refusing to essentialize or pass moral judgment on her subjects, Shin's eye mines the prohibited and the liminal to deconstruct notions of propriety. Her photographs intimately peer into the unseen spaces between photographer and subject, self and other, as well as public and private.

Heji Shin: THE BIG NUDES curated by Ebony L. Haynes and presented by 52 Walker.

Born in Seoul, Heji Shin (b. 1976) lives and works in New York. She has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as at KAT_A, Bad Honnef, Germany (2022); Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2021); and Kunsthalle Zürich (2018). Shin has had several solo presentations at galleries worldwide, most recently at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York (2018 and 2020); Galerie Buchholz, Berlin (2019); Gaga & Reena Spaulings, Los Angeles (2019); Galerie Bernhard, Zurich (2016); Real Fine Arts, New York (2013 and 2016); and Anna-Catharina Gebbers, Berlin (2010).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
52 Walker is pleased to announce its eighth exhibition, which will feature the work of New York-based artist Heji Shin (b. 1976).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
TEST SUBJECTS: THE ART OF JOSEPHINE PRYDE

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Josephine Pryde, Scale XVI, 2012, color photograph, 41 3/4 x 31 7/8″. WALKING ALONG DÜSSELDORF’S GRABBEPLATZ toward the grim gray Brutalist building that houses the Kunstverein für die Rheinl…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Josephine Pryde | The Art Institute of Chicago

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Open to the public Wednesday-Saturday, 11AM-6PM

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Proposals for a Memorial to Partition

Aruna D'Souza
Thirteen international artists respond to the ongoing legacy of trauma, violence, and defiance caused by the 1947 division.
Proposals for a Memorial to Partition, curated by Murtaza Vali,
Twelve Gates Arts, 106 North Second Street, Philadelphia, PA,
through October 28, 2023

Partition has cast a long, unrelenting, traumatic shadow on my parents' generation, on mine, even on my child's. How could it not? By the time the British Raj was forced to leave South Asia, its divide-and-conquer strategy had made near impossible the creation of a single postcolonial nation in which Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, and the so-called "untouchable" castes (who adopted the name Dalits) could coexist. And so, in 1947, leaders of these groups drew a line that excised the predominantly Muslim east and west from the Hindu-dominated hulking mass of the subcontinent, forcing tens of millions of people to decide whether to stay in place or go to the land that had been assigned to their coreligionists. Somewhere between fourteen and eighteen million uprooted themselves in a matter of months, resulting in one of the largest mass migrations in human history.

More than a million of those migrants died, brutally, at the hands of people who had formerly counted them as neighbors; the stories of the almost inhuman violence enacted upon those crossing the border-rapes, disembowelments, castrations, baby killings-still haunt so many of us, no matter the temporal and geographical distance. But Partition didn't end there. The subsequent amputation of East Pakistan from West, creating the nation of Bangladesh in 1971; the decades-long aggression between India and Pakistan, which has consumed lives and left places like Kashmir, claimed by both, in a state of siege; the current Hindu nationalism driving Narendra Modi's fascist rule-all can be traced to the mess the British left behind, a mess many South Asians have had little interest in cleaning up.

Murtaza Vali, a Brooklyn- and Sharjah-based curator and critic, has organized what he calls a "peripatetic curatorial platform" that explores the cascading effects of this historical cataclysm. Proposals for a Memorial to Partition opened in 2022 at Dubai's Jameel Arts Centre and now appears, in a new and smaller iteration, at Twelve Gates Arts (a gallery in Philadelphia that focuses on artists from West and South Asia). Thirteen makers from around the globe offer up sculptures, small-scale installations, drawings, paintings, videos, sound recordings, and artist books in the storefront space. Though the title refers to the idea of a memorial, the show eschews almost entirely the oft-related notion of the monumental. Instead, modestly sized works, some as small as a postcard, present opportunities to connect the unhealed wounds of the past to the rawness of the present.

A flag for three mothers (2023), by Montreal- and Brooklyn-based Jaret Vadera, hangs just outside the gallery's entrance. If colonialism operated according to a bureaucratic logic of classifying populations, counting and dividing them into subcategories of otherness, Vadera uses such information as a kind of algorithm. The color of his banner, a pale yellowish green, is derived from the various shades of the flags of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, each weighted according to their populations, the resulting admixture presented as a monochrome. The piece reads at once as a utopian fantasy of reunification and its opposite: the jaundiced hue that results from Vadera's process has no vibrancy, no life to it-it is muddied and dull.

More than one work on view ties the sectarianism that led to Partition to the massive demonstrations, often swelling to 150,000 people strong, that took place at Shaheen Bagh, a Muslim neighborhood in the Indian capital, in 2019-20. The protesters-largely women, from children to great-grandmothers-came out in support of students who had been violently suppressed for demonstrating against the Modi government. The catalyst for the outcry was the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, legislation that fast-tracks naturalization for refugees but pointedly excludes those of the Islamic faith, and related policy announcements that many believed could be used to strip citizenship from Muslims. Mumbai-based photographer Prarthna Singh's clothbound photobook Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh. A record of the 100 day protest that took place in New Delhi from December 2019 to March 2020 (2022) is composed primarily of striking portraits of the women who risked their safety to defy an authoritarian government, along with transcriptions of their chants and songs, and other texts; it is accompanied by an audio piece-field recordings of the protest. Nearby, Singh's The Constitution of India. My father's copy, gifted to him by his father on the day he joined the Civil Services (2020) is a reminder of the distance India has traveled from the ideals of its democratic origins to today, and of the rights these hundreds of thousands of women were asserting-rights that Hindu nationalists have been working hard to take away from them.

India's constitution was written by Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a jurist, scholar, and reformer who sought the liberation of Dalits, a group that has for millennia been shackled to its place at the bottom of a social hierarchy. Rajyashri Goody's Essential Services (2003) reproduces a series of letters between Ambedkar and India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, written months after the borders were drawn. In them, Ambedkar urges Nehru to intervene on behalf of Dalits who were being prevented from leaving what were now East and West Pakistan. The reason? Their dangerous and ill-paid work-as garbage pickers, as "sweepers" (cleaners of latrines and sewers), and other jobs in sanitation-had been declared "essential" by the new state authorities. (Those who did manage to get out were often denied entry to refugee camps because of their caste status.) The connection between the essential services provided by Dalits in 1947 and those provided by men and women in the US-largely racialized, mostly immigrants, often poor-during the pandemic is impossible to escape. Another of Goody's pieces, Did you close the door? Or did you find it closed against you? (2023), installed above, likewise asks us to read the present through the past. The title phrase is rendered on the wall in excrement-colored clay slip; the artist paraphrases Ambedkar's words as a question, asking all of us to consider our role in defining borders-geographical, social, racial, classist, or indeed casteist.

A number of works tie the refugee crisis of Partition to those happening today. One such example is Sreshta Rit Premnath's Catch and Release (2023), an ethereal drawing made by sandwiching cotton rope, handwoven to resemble a chain-link fence, between two pieces of white paper. Another is Bangladeshi photographer Munem Wasif's three photographs from a larger series titled Spring Song (2017-19). In the latter, humble objects, studio-lit to create crisp detail, are shot against vivid backgrounds: we see a beat-up bottle of skin lotion, a small toy house made of thin wood lath and string, a bundle of dried fish. The pictures wouldn't be out of place in a magazine or on a billboard, though their status as commodities is iffy at best. Rather, they portray the possessions of a few of the millions of Rohingya people fleeing genocide in Myanmar who ended up in what is now the world's largest refugee camp, in Bangladesh. Wasif's choice to focus on signs of people's determination to carve out a comforting ordinariness of daily life in the worst circumstances, rather than trotting out the usual pathetic images of people in distress, is gutting. The result is a quietly insistent reminder, one proffered by so many works in this exhibition, that we have not fully learned the lessons of 1947.

Aruna D'Souza is a writer and critic based in New York. She contributes to the New York Times and 4Columns, and is author of Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts (Badlands Unlimited, 2018). She is currently working on a new book, Seven Pictures for a New World, and a volume of collected essays.

# data[].attributes.body
https://nmwa.org/whats-on/exhibitions/online/graciela-iturbides-mexico/

# data[].attributes.body
https://nmwa.org/whats-on/exhibitions/online/mary-ellen-mark-girlhood/

# data[].attributes.body
Some of the art work in this collection had me asking myself why is it connecting it to my inner story. I wonder how to make such moving images myself and I also notice some connections to lines and connections in two of the works. I ask myself now what is the story and what composition am I taking. I have been struggling with the battle of proving myself in this medium mostly because my father also too photography in his college year and mostly recognizes it as a way to document and not as an art. I am deeply motivated in this new medium and am excited to continue seeing photography exhibits so that I can stay inspired and motivated. I dont know what it would take to impress my family in a medium that they see daily but I am dedicated to impress myself.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
LACP's annual Members Exhibition delves in to our personal perspectives of-and relationships with-lands, cities or uncharted terrains: imagined topographies and tangible locations.

Top Prize Winners

First Place - Diane Meyer
Second Place - Laurie Freitag
Third Place - Elizabeth Bailey

Juror

Andi Campognone, MOAH Museum Director and curator

Virtual Opening Reception

Thursday, September 14, 7 pm PST. RSVP HERE

Exhibiting Artists

Elizabeth Bailey, Sheri Behr, Douglas Caldwell, Tracy Chandler, Gina Cholick, Annie Claflin, Stephanie Cochinos, Dora Duan, Richard Dweck, Fran Forman, Laurie Freitag, Kymberli Ghee, Joan Haseltine, Douglas Hill, Jim Hill, Claudia Hoag, Mark Indig, Seyedeh sareh Jalali, Michael Kirchoff, Peter Krask, Alison Lake, Denise Laurinaitis, Lisa Levine, Kerry Mansfield, Natalie McGuire, Diane Meyer, Louise Russell, Alina Saranti, Richard Stanley, Stephanie Sydney, Joshua Tann, Emerson Xia, Torrance York, Ellen Zimmerman

About

It might be a land or a town we inhabit, a space that either rejected or welcomed us, or a place we imagined a certain way before encountering its realities. It could be our adoptive or chosen home, or a plot of family land we never got to see. Whether concrete or imagined, territories define how we understand our place in the world, how we tell ourselves our histories and the stories of our belonging.

LACP's annual Members Exhibition delves in to our personal perspectives of-and relationships with-lands, cities or uncharted terrains: imagined topographies and tangible locations.

The Juror

Andi Campognone has over 30 years of arts experience in the southern California region. She is the Owner/Director of AC Projects, a private consulting organization focused on promoting arts and culture. Projects include developing museum exhibitions, public engagement, mentoring programs and book and film publications of historically relevant southern California artists.

Campognone is also the Museum Manager/Curator for the City of Lancaster. She is responsible for the development and maintenance of partnerships and community engagement initiatives with local artists, local businesses, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, Los Angeles County Supervisors office and higher level institutions. She develops curatorial direction for exhibition and educational programming and is directing the Museum accreditation process for MOAH. She has previously served the City of Pomona as Cultural Arts Commissioner where she co-wrote and implemented the City's Master Cultural Arts Plan and the adopted Arts in Public Places Policy. Campognone is on the Board of the Lancaster Museum and Public Art Foundation and on the Board of the Holualoa Foundation for Arts and Culture. She volunteers as a regular speaker and mentor to art students at both the undergraduate and graduate level and is on the advisory boards of Start Up Art Fair Los Angeles and Los Angeles Arts Association. She is a member of ArTTable.

Juror Statment

It is always a pleasure to collaborate with LACP and I thoroughly enjoyed viewing all the submissions for Personal Territory. While many of the photographs interpreted the theme through the physical landscape without the presence of the figure, that presence wasn't necessary to recognize themes of personal introspection, self-evaluation, and a keen commentary on our place as humans in the world.

I found, as I examined the work, strong connections to the sublime even in imagery that might be viewed as disturbing. The dream like representations made through the use of mixed media and alternative processes were meaningful, a refreshing break from the standard applied function of the 2D medium, which elicits both hope and excitement as artists expand on ideas of what defines a photograph.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Personal Territory: Annual Members Exhibition - The Los Angeles Center of Photography

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
LACP's annual Members Exhibition delves in to our personal perspectives of--and relationships with--lands, cities or uncharted terrains: imagined topographies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Landscape Photography | Real Estate Photography

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Gestalt psychology is an attempt to find laws and principles of how our mind organises the seemingly chaotic world and describes how we get and perceive meaningful information. The psychologists have formed a bunch of laws and principles showing how our brains work. Since gestalt perception is about organising things, it blends nicely with the composition because it serves the same purpose. And we artists can apply these concepts to the art to improve the perception of our works. The most efficient application lies in design but we also could steal a few things and use it for photography.

Gestalt Laws Photography Application

Law of Proximity

Law of Proximity states that we perceive objects located near each other as a group. This way we use a group of objects as a composition building block rather than a single object.

This separation doesn't add much to the story here but is very good for illustrating the principle. The storytelling example would be to show some hint of relations between the groups.

Law of Similarity

We also group objects which have some sort of similarity. The can have a similar shape, colour, size, etc. The usage is the same as for the proximity - we can use a group of related objects as a composition accent. It also helps with the storytelling.

In this instance, the dark and light groups help us to read the photo and create some story behind it. The photo above is called a "Wedding" or a "Dance". This would not be possible without the Similarity Law grouping.

We can easily name this photo "Leaders" because it just makes sense with the two bigger yachts.

Law of Closure

Law of Closure supports the Suggested Lines principle and extends it to the Suggested Shapes. This means that our brain fills the gaps and forms shapes with whatever lines are present in the photo. This law is fundamental and useful as it allows to build shapes inside of the picture, make accents and control the flow of the viewer's eye. I've covered this topic in the Composition Building Blocks section.

Law of Symmetry

Law of symmetry describes our brain's tendency to look for symmetries and group objects around this principle. Humans are mostly symmetrical, and this way of things is natural for our perception. It's also easy to break this law increasing the tension - break the symmetry where it is suggested. The important thing to understand here is that we are not talking about something precisely symmetrical, an approximation is usually good enough when we are talking about photography.

Some of these laws are pretty challenging when it comes to the actual implementation. Have a look at the photo below:

Ok, but why do we even care? This law doesn't really add to the previous photo apart from breaking the rhythm, it just sits there. But the photo below, on the contrary, shows a usage example.

Law of Common Fate

Law of Common Fate states that we perceive objects as a whole if they have the same moving path or we think they do. We think that the objects moving in a similar direction share the motion trends and thus a common fate.

Law of Continuity

According to the Law of Continuity, we group elements that are aligned with an object, and we are less likely to combine ingredients that have distinctly different directions or alignments.

Law of Good Gestalt

This one is exciting. It states that we tend to filter our parts of the reality, to simplify the surrounding to find order and regular pattern. In my experience, it should be a purpose rather than a tool when we talk about photography. Our eyes do filter out a lot of things, but it doesn't work when we look at the photo. So, we should deliberately get rid of all things that do not work for the story we are trying to tell. We should make an effort to present a final photo as a clean product. So that a random viewer immediately sees it as having a good gestalt.

Law of Past Experience

This law says that we can group objects based on experience rather than momentary layout. If we know that the objects tend to appear together or shortly one after the other, then we group them. There are few consequences here:

1. This law allows us to build relations between distant objects without any geometrical relation between them. But this one is less exciting than the second consequence.

2. We can impress the viewer by breaking this law. We need to include some objects that fail this rule, i.e. show some rare combination.

Gestalt Principles

The main gestalt principles are emergence, reification, multistability and invariance.

Emergence

This principle tells us that we perceive an object as a whole, not as a collection of parts. It has little application to photography.

Reification

Reification is a practical law. This principle states that we can perceive more spatial information that it is present in the picture. It confirms one of the composition principles I describe elsewhere in this article - the suggested lines building block. Our brain tends to expand and build on top of what we see. We extend these shapes with some illusory contours.

Of course, these shapes do not apply to photography as is. Rather, we need to understand the principle - how some objects create or suggest some other shapes that do not, in fact, exist in the original photo. The most simple application is suggested lines.

Multistability

Multistability describes ambiguous perception going back and forth between several interpretations of an image. Some sort of the optical illusion. It has a wide application in design and graphics and no so easy to do in photography.

One use is to seek Pareidolia objects in our everyday life.

Invariance

Invariance suggests that we perceive objects in the same way regardless of their rotation, deformation and scale. If we recognise an object, we can quickly identify it in any state.

This principle has many applications in photography and art in general. Scale, figure-to-ground relation, linear perspective. The fundamental idea is to use Invariance and represent a well-known object in unusual conditions or environment.

On the contrary, we could do something opposite:

How To Use Gestalt Psychology

This chapter is the most theoretical one in the whole article and doesn't show any practical tips or techniques. Yet, it serves a useful purpose - gives another perspective and expands our understanding. It's not that easy to transform these laws and principles into some magical recipes. These laws are beneficial for planning shots and telling a story. They tell you how to separate part of the photographed objects and how to build relations between them.

Gestalt Psychology Criticism

Like any other theory, it has its critics. The main arguments against Gestalt Psychology are:

1. Lack of experimental data.

2. Descriptive nature of the principles rather than explanatory.

Such critics make sense, and we should not blindly believe any of these. Instead, let's try everything out ourselves and see if it works.

Conclusion

Gestalt psychology is another take on formalising the human perception of art. Right or not, it definitely has something behind it and it helps to understand how we tend to organise things. This could help us to create better stories and convey without any words better.
Follow me on Instagram

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Gestalt Perception in Photography - Landscape Photography | Real Estate Photography

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Gestalt psychology is an attempt to find laws and principles of how our mind organises the seemingly chaotic world and describes how we get and perceive meaningful information. The psychologists have formed a bunch of laws and principles showing how our brains work.

# data[].attributes.body
Notes/ writing on the reading

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
MASS MoCA | Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Exhibition

On view now

B6: The Robert W. Wilson Building

"Photography is an act of love." This statement by photographer and critic Hervé Guibert is well illustrated in the subtle but striking work of the Bronx-born Puerto Rican photographer Elle Pérez. Pérez has become known for photographs that capture with a unique sense of ease the intimacy between friends, lovers, bodies, and nature-as well as the intimate relationship between photographer and subject. Pérez works with the Muay Thai, queer, and artist communities that are part of their daily life. Though their photographs are often mistaken for documentary images, Pérez collaborates with their subjects, using the deep trust that exists to produce images that exude openness and vulnerability. Connection and fluidity are central themes within their practice, the networks of associations that exist between their varied subjects-bodies of water, moments of human touch-as much a part of the meaning as the individual works.

About the Artist:
Elle Pérez (b. 1989, Bronx, New York) is an artist based in New York City. They received a BFA in Photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore in 2011 and an MFA from Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut in 2015 and participated in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, Maine that same year. Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland (2022); the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (2021); Public Art Fund, New York (2019); and MoMA PS1, New York (2018). They were included in the 59th International Venice Biennale (2022) and the Whitney Biennial (2019) and have been featured in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2022), Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2022), Renaissance Society, Chicago (2020); Barbican Centre, London (2020); Brooklyn Museum, New York 2019). Pérez's work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; the Block Museum of Art, Illinois; the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.

In 2023, Pérez won the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. They have also been awarded the Civil Society Institute Fellowship, the Theo Westenberger Foundation Photography Prize, the Bronx Recognizes Its Own grant, and the Jane Meyer Photography Traveling Fellowship. They were an artist-in-residence at MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire, and Lightwork, New York, in 2022. Pérez is Assistant Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University and has taught at the Yale School of Art, Cooper Union, and Williams College. From 2016 to 2021, they were a Dean at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. The artist is represented by 47 Canal, New York and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles.
Download a PDF of the exhibition here.
slip curve (detail), 2021
archival pigment print
14 × 11 in (35.56 × 27.94 cm)
17 × 14 × 2 in (43.18 × 35.56 × 5.08 cm) (framed) Edition of 5 plus II AP
Image courtesy of the artist and 47 Canal, New York

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
July 22 | Bronx-born Puerto Rican photographer Elle Pérez captures intimacy between friends, lovers, bodies, and nature in a solo exhibition of vulnerable images at MASS MoCA.

# data[].attributes.body
I have recently started to focus on these storytelling compositions and recording. I have dabbled in the video recording elements of my camera and feel a little stuck in the process in which I can combine the two elements together