Judith Henry "Who I saw in NY, circa 1970-2000"
0.00156 acres
This event has ended.
0.00156 acres presents Who I saw in NY, circa 1970-2000, a photography exhibition by artist Judith Henry.
Three walls, one hundred and thirty six photo-papers, one thousand one hundred and sixty one black & white images, two thousand three hundred and ninety seven people; this is the rough make up of Henry’s photo installation.
For more than forty years, Henry has been carrying a small camera around the streets of New York, randomly taking pictures of people. The wall to wall, floor to ceiling installation at 0.00156 acres looks like a collage in which the images are the pieces that give shape to a pattern. It is the artist’s intention to document the infinite variety of people, styles, races, ages and expressions that inhabits this city.
The protagonists in these images are just going about their business, some walking, others rushing, some alone, others together holding hands, some going upstairs and others going downstairs, some in doorways, others waiting on street corners for a light to change. Everything merges like a wallpaper pattern, yet each individual keeps his/her identity when observed close up or at a distance. Among the mundane multitudes, Henry has captured the very real existence of day to day life in Manhattan; life and lives that existed long before Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and cell phones.
The photos in the exhibition were taken with a cheap point and shoot camera and then developed and printed at a one-hour photo shop. The artist worked quickly, not allowing herself time to pick and choose the people in the picture, and the result is an authentic, unadulterated survey of a changing community throughout the years. For this installation the artist scanned the original prints and arranged them using Photoshop on an Apple computer, their visible Photoshop frame contrasting with the lack of technology used to capture the images.
Besides her camera, Henry has traversed the streets also with a small notebook, eavesdropping on the people she encounters. The combination of both, photos and notes, has taken many forms: books [the Overheard series], video Anonymous True Stories, paintings, gallery installations, photography, and video. Henry’s books will be available for sale at the gallery.
Judith Henry, a multi-media artist, was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. After receiving a BFA from Carnegie-Mellon she moved to New York in the late 1960s where she began to use typography as her art form. In the beginning she made drawings on top of printed pages of a book by, Sigmund Freud. She then began incorporating typography with photographic images. By the mid 1970s she began eavesdropping on the subjects of her street photography. Snippets of dialogue combined with photographs entered her work when she produced her original Overheard series of books. Overheard at the Museum (1999) was the first of four published by Rizzoli, International Publishers. Overheard in America was published by Simon and Schuster in 2006. She also began recording people telling intimate and anonymous personal stories which led to a book and then a series of expressionistic videos using the interviewees voices.
Anonymous True Stories (1996) will be available for purchase.
Her work has been shown in New York, Los Angeles, Cleveland and internationally in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, London and Switzerland.
Media
Schedule
from September 10, 2011 to November 20, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-09-10 from 19:00 to 21:00