NYAB Event - Josh Lehrer "Becoming Visible"

Josh Lehrer "Becoming Visible"

Robert Miller Gallery

This event has ended.

Robert Miller Gallery is pleased to present Becoming Visible, a special project by Josh Lehrer. The exhibition will be the artist’s first at a New York gallery and comprises eleven cyanotype portraits of members of New York’s homeless teenage transgendered community.

In his works Lehrer deftly interweaves the technical and aesthetic histories of photographic portraiture. Like the artist’s portraits, the Cyanotype process’ rich history spans both the scientific/documentary and the personal/intimate tendencies within the genre. In purely visible terms the works exhibited equally function as intimate portraits of individuals and as historic documents of a hidden history and population. The historicizing intention is however deeply reinforced by the medium’s antiquity. This concern with creating a history for those who have not been represented within our collective visual culture echoes the well know efforts by artists such as The Atlas Group (Walid Raad) and Sedyou Keita to create parallel histories.

Robert Peter Miller states that “presenting the work of Josh Lehrer in a project room, is consistent with the gallery’s long term progressive social mission. These youth are among the most marginal of New York’s communities. Many of their lives are often marked by tragedy that is more poignant because of or collective indifference to them. They are today’s Invisible Man. A cruel irony given that they are also the city’s fastest growing homeless demographic.” Robert Miller Gallery and Josh Lehrer will jointly contribute a portion of the proceeds of all sales to Sylvia’s Place in Manhattan, the shelter where many of these youth reside.

Josh Lehrer is a graduate of Boston University’s School of Fine Arts and the International Center for Photography. His commercial work can be seen in subway stations throughout New York, billboards in Time Square and in The New York Times, The New York Post, Elle, Avenue, Gotham and Hamptons Magazine. Lehrer has shot advertising campaigns for Staples, The Sharper Image, and numerous Broadway shows.

[Image: Josh Lehrer "E and Joanna" (2009) Cyanotype, 19 x 25 in.]