“Transcript: Yale MFA Photography 2019 Thesis Show” Exhibition

Yancey Richardson Gallery

[Image: Brian Galderisi "Untitled" (2019)]

This event has ended.

Yancey Richardson Gallery presents Transcript, an exhibition of work by recent graduates of the 2019 Yale MFA Photography program. Organized by the artist James Welling, the show includes works by Sara Abbaspour, Genesis Báez, Molly Berman, Felix Davey, Brian Galderisi, Rodrigo López, Kaitlin Maxwell, Chase Middleton, Angel Pedro and Kanthy Peng.

Over the years, the gallery has championed a number of Yale MFA Photography graduates, representing and exhibiting the work of alumni Sharon Core, Bryan Graf, David Hilliard, Lisa Kereszi, Laura Letinsky, Victoria Sambunaris and Mark Steinmetz, as well as Mickalene Thomas from Yale’s MFA in Painting. We are proud to be hosting this exhibition in continued support of young photographers, as well as offering an insight into the methodology of one of the preeminent MFA programs in the country.

MFA Photography at Yale was founded in the 1950s by John T. Hill and Herbert Matter. (Hill, now in his eighties, can still be joined for lunch at Tandoor New Haven on Chapel Street, as I did last December). Hill and Matter brought in Walker Evans shortly after founding the program and then hired a sequence of inspirational teachers ranging from Jerome Liebling to Tod Papageorge and Richard Benson. Over the years, the Yale faculty has included Lois Conner, Catherine Opie, Gregory Crewdson, John Pilson and A.L Steiner and many, many other visiting critics and speakers.

Yale’s graduate photography program is a beast that demands and consumes new photographs every week. These ten 2019 MFA students, whose efforts you see in the gallery today, filled the critique room walls with photographs, installations and videos week after week after week for the last two years. Their astonishing works are the result of this intense annealing process - dare one say unique to Yale - long hours of work and incessant discourse.

I keep thinking we live in the golden age of photography. Today almost every photographic process is still viable and digital image processing and inkjet printing have opened up the field in unexpected and unpredictable ways. And what’s being looked at by this group of young photographers, from Iran, China, Ireland, Australia, Mexico, Puerto Rico and the United States, and then “processed” by them could scarcely be more wide ranging and expansive. It was an honor to have participated in their fall reviews over the past two years and now to assist in presenting their work at Yancey Richardson.
- James Welling