At the core of Melissa Ann Pinney's work lies a series of photographs of Pinney's daughter Emma, as she moves through childhood to the verge of adolescence. The project swirls out from there, through friends and classmates, past their families, neighborhoods, social rituals and community lives, to develop a richly nuanced study of emerging female identity, with its promises and perils.
Pinney continues to follow those narratives, and the themes contained within them. The work focuses on a touchstone moment in the lives of American girls and women: their emergence from protected youth to public maturity. In these pictures, by turns hauntingly evocative and closely focused, Pinney portrays the uneasiness of that emergence-in the struggle to fit ideal dresses to real bodies, proper etiquette to ebullient energies and appetites, natural companionship to formal conversation as the girls of a certain class prepare themselves for the rest of their lives and some of their first social contacts with boys. "The strength of Pinney's work has always lain in her ability to sympathetically inhabit the lives of her subjects, while understanding their place in the larger ebb and flow of social life around them," photographic and cultural historian Peter Bacon Hales has written. "The pictures are so often gorgeous in their manner, and heartbreaking in their implications; rarely do we see photographs that can imply so much without intruding or announcing their intentions."
Part of the force of these pictures comes from the painstaking perfection of the color prints that Pinney makes from her negatives. Colors glow; mirrors snap with reflected light, skin and cloth seem tangible; figures emerge from dark spaces or drape themselves uneasily on furniture which gleams with polish and floats within the plush environments where these girls and their consorts learn to enact the rituals of appearance.
Melissa Ann Pinney's closely-observed studies of the social lives and emerging identities of American girls and women have won the photographer numerous fellowships and awards, including a Guggenheim Foundation Grant. Her work has been included in many major museum exhibitions including The Museum of Modern Art's "Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort" and, most recently The Chicago Art Institute's "Girls on the Verge" exhibition in 2008, which included work by Rineke Dijkstra, Lauren Greenfield and Judith Joy Ross.
CAMERA WORK is pleased to present an exhibition by American photographer Mark Laita. The exhibition will commence on February 4, 2012, and for the first time in Europe will feature the three new series Sea, Serpentine and Amaranthine with unique photographs of the most fascinating sea creatures, the most impressive serpents and ...
« I began my first self-portraits at the age of 10. My maternal grandmother was the spark for this new passion. She was the one who bought me a little red Kodak, even if I remember having to go to great lengths in order to get it. In my first snapshots, I took center stage in front of the camera. I just reproduced what I knew: fashion models. Born to a ...
Applying cultural clichés as a catalyst, the exhibition focuses on stereotypes, which has given cultural meaning to the specificities of a given region, Finland. Literally speaking Finland does not belong to the Arctic in a geographic sense, but the Finns are – as are, sa...
Le masque est le support de la puissance, la médiation entre l’être supérieur, les ancêtres et les humains.Il accompagne l’homme au limite de la vie et du surnaturel. Il met face à face les dieux, les génies et les hommes. La relation entre le photographe et le masque exige un rapport de compréhension, un...
La nouvelle exposition de Marc Le Mené à la galerie Pascal Gabert est une petite rétrospective de son travail photographique qui parcourt une trentaine d’années de création débutant par des autoportraits, des nus, des images de nuit (Paris, Rome) pour se diriger vers des images construites et imagin...
Antoine Picard développe un travail où la nature et la ville se mêlent en des formes autonomes. Dans la rue émergent des signes de réappropriation du végétal, alors que la campagne est parsemées de vestiges urbains. Il semble qu'un ordre nouveau se met en place. L'homme reste le...
La Cité présente Migrants en Guyane, Chercher la vie, une exposition de photographies de Frédéric Piantoni, réalisée en coproduction avec le Musée des cultures guyanaises. En quatre séquences thématiques - les parcours, les quartiers, l’immigration des femmes et les fro...
Après le succès remporté aux foires de photographie contemporaine Chic Art Fair et Fotofever Paris, la galerie Madé vous invite à (re)découvrir le travail d’une jeune artiste aux talents prometteurs, Maia Flore. Pour sa première exposition solo, Maia présentera la série compl&eg...
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