Peter Kayafas
The Way West
For the past decade, Peter Kayafas has spent at least four weeks each summer driving upwards of 7,000 miles to photograph in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Colorado, revealing to us The Way West. Continuing his ongoing exploration of the backroads of America, Kayafas uses his camera to investigate the histories and ritualized traditions of the people living there and the important connection they have to the land and the animals. Images of rodeos, state fairs, 4-H fairs, carnivals, all gathering places, reveal young people in their shared and individual passage into adulthood. They are accumulating and embracing the experience and knowledge of the struggles and challenges of life in the West, their life. The backdrop is the rugged and wide-open landscape of the American West with all of its complexities and intimate connections to the place and the animals.
Accompanying the exhibition is Kayafas’ fourth monograph, Peter Kayafas: The Way West with an essay by acclaimed writer Rick Bass. Excerpts from the Afterword:
One of the many things that is powerful about these photographs by Peter Kayafas is the cunning yet also unpretentious way in which the old memes are shown to be secondary to the primal power of youth, and youth in a western landscape.
These photographs are filaments of light that connect us to strangers who, though strange, are as recognizable as they are unfamiliar.
Peter Kayafas is a photographer, publisher, curator, and teacher who lives in New York City where he is the Director of the Eakins Press Foundation and the Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of the Corporation of Yaddo. He is a Guggenheim Fellow (2019), and his photographs have been widely exhibited and are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the New York Public Library; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the New Orleans Museum of Art; the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. He has taught photography at Pratt Institute since 2000. In addition to The Way West, Purple Martin Press has published three other monographs of Kayafas’s photographs—The Merry Cemetery of Sapunta (2007), O Public Road! Photographs of America (2009) and Totems (2012).
Logan Nutter
Late Nights
Logan Nutter has been living and working in the Boston area for nearly 20 years. During this time he has photographed Late Nights, inhabiting the late gathering places, observing the interactions and intimate moments shared by those who are alone in a crowd. These black and white photographs explore a range of emotions – is the couple at the bar celebrating or in disagreement? Is the embracing couple leaning against the wall, aware of the camera or others so close by as they share an intimate touch?
Nutter, not the voyeur but a regular, a participant, embraces the atmosphere, the light, and the people. He presents a palpable milieu of Late Nights allowing the viewer their personal narrative. These are his places – one can be alone and not lonely as well as lonely and not alone…
“Logan Nutter gives recognizable faces to the loneliness that often haunts us all with melancholy capable of stalking us even into our most enduring, and endured relationships. Mindful but undaunted, continue to seek we must, and continue to see we do, and through the keen and practiced intelligence of Logan’s camera-eye we are privileged to the poetry that he eloquently recites as late-night bars empty onto emptier streets, and the sprit stiffens against the cold of the alone. —Jack Lueders-Booth
Peter Chan
You & I
We are pleased to be exhibiting You and I, a series of photographs by Peter Chan. Chan using a 4×5” camera and extended exposures, photographs urban life with its everyday occurrences and happenings. His techniques take the normal unplanned or choregraphed movements in public places transforming the reality, embracing distortion, scale, transparency, superimposition, as well as lens flare. In Chan’s case, lens flare is a creative process and never a mistake. His images are transitions and encounters, an implied dream. He asks the viewer to examine their past and their origin. There is a oneness combining the camera, the photographer and the subject.
Considering the negative as his theater, Chan chooses from what is in the defined space to capture the experience, the emotional spirit. There is no manipulation to the photo – everything happens in the camera.
“The contents of these images express the common fundamentals of human experience, psyche and emotions such as fragments of past experience, transient memories, residue consciousness, hopes and yearnings, connection with oneself, with others, with nature, and indeed with life’s journey itself. These are issues that we have been exploring and expressing through the ages and will continue to do so. These are what make us human.” —Peter Chan
Peter Chan lives and works in Toronto, Canada, and is a graduate of The Ontario College of Art and Design University. He is a recipient of the CAPIC (Canadian Association of Professional Image Creators) Award, has taught photography at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His photographs are in the National Gallery of Canada Collection.