Jonathan Auch “APOSTASY”

Le Poisson Rouge

poster for Jonathan Auch “APOSTASY”

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The Gallery at Le Poisson Rouge welcomes photographer Jonathan Auch for an exhibition that captures contemporary New York seen through a unique lens. As the title, APOSTASY, suggests, Auch reveals the everyday iconography of religion as found in the subway stations, rainy street corners, and delis of the city. He finds it distorted, disfigured, unrecognizable to viewer and itself through his camera. These photos see the divine and the unholy existing side by side in the bars, nail parlors, and crosswalks of “a city of apostates.”

In APOSTASY the mundane and familiar become obfuscated into its own religious experience. It is a gritty, weary world of blurred lines and increasingly confused residents. These black and white photos themselves twist towards the rhetorical obfuscation that APOSTASY highlights as viewers find the subjects of the images not in black and white, but many shades of vibrant grey. Faces morph, torsos recede into the night, rain twists the once clear lines where the individual ends and the city begins.

The Gallery at LPR is proud to present this exhibition of images with “figures that cluster underneath elevated trains at night, on street corners, in coffee shops, or black throngs leaking out of bars onto the sidewalk.” The exhibition will run through March 10 and will be viewable at all events in The Gallery at LPR.


In New York, we are a city of apostates. In New York nothing is sacred, nothing eternal. Defined by where you are, not who you are, the rest blurs. My photographs are the collision of the internal with the external, the private with the public, which produces the contradictions inherit in modern New York life.

These photographs are New York Street Photographs in the sense that the figure’s interior form (life) has merged with the external (street). The boundary between subject and background is blurred, the faces distorted or sometimes completely lost. While the subjects still retain some of their inherit qualities, their individual identities are lost. Gazes tethered to one another by an indirect gaze. The gaze smears. The long exposed street lights provide glowing strings, holding the rhythm of the city, yet devolving into discord and chaos.This unique capturing produces moments that render the internal struggle of man with his city in a visceral, almost primal way.

Many times those who suffer on the broken sidewalks are invisible. They are deaf and mute not just to passers-by, but to themselves. Their principles lost, their identities and truth in flux. The city has swallowed them whole and they have been digested, reduced to their most simple selves. These photographs seek to explore that struggle, to invert the individual — his desires, sorrows, and wants despite his herded appearance.

These figures that cluster underneath elevated trains at night, on street corners, in coffee shops, or black throngs leaking out of bars onto the sidewalk all tell a hidden soulful reality. Humans aching to connect, to tell their story of a lost truth.

Jonathan Lucas Auch was born in New York City in 1984. He studied painting at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena California. Upon returning to New York City and training as darkroom printer, Jonathan Auch has worked as an assistant to street photographer Bruce Gilden. For 3 years he was the exhibition printer and assistant for photojournalist James Nachtwey, where he was responsible for all print production used in exhibits, periodicals, galleries, and museums including: the TED prize, Le Laboratoire, Max-Planck-Institut and Look3.

As a freelance photographer, Jonathan works both on the street and producing photo/video reportage on a variety of stories which focus on political, cultural and emotional isolation, alienation, loneliness, racism and discrimination. Auch has enjoyed numerous exhibitions, most recently “Front Line,” at Lorimoto Gallery, New York, NY. Other exhibitions include “Highlights,” The Gallery at LPR, New York, NY; “WBAI Sandy Benefit Show,” Steve Kasher Gallery, New York, NY; “Occupy,” RagTag Gallery, Columbia, Missouri; “THE FENCE at Photoville,” New York, NY; “和 [Wa] Photography Auction: Japan Tsunami Relief” 25CPW, New York, NY; “Sonje (Creole for Remember),” Sacred Gallery NYC, New York, NY; “El Tropico de Cáncer,” Fuller Gallery, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico; and the upcoming “MCNY Rising Waters Exhibition,” New York, NY. His photography has been featured in the New York Times and his work has been highlighted by Rangefinder Magazine, Bushwick Daily, and the Associated Press.

Media

Schedule

from November 06, 2013 to March 10, 2014

Opening Reception on 2013-11-06 from 18:30 to 20:30

Artist(s)

Jonathan Auch

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