September 6 – October 29, 2011
The Philadelphia Photo Arts Center is excited to announce The Greater Area, an exhibition running from September 6th to October 29th with an opening reception on Thursday, September 8th from 6-9pm. The exhibition features the work of Gregory Halpern, Caitlin Teal Price and Will Steacy.
Greater Area is a term used to describe the reach of a city or metropolitan area. Borrowing the term, this exhibition draws upon physical, metaphorical, literal or imagined borders that exist within cities and their inhabitants. The Greater Area depicts contemporary cities as physical and psychological spaces fraught with solitude and caught in the midst of transformation.
The show also highlights photography’s unique capacity to transform the setting of the story, in this case the backdrop of the American city, into the focus of the work itself. The collected works utilize a variety of stylistic approaches that draw upon the histories of both landscape and
portraiture photography. The result is an exhibition that combines elements of the city that are simultaneously overlooked and ignored.
In his most recent series A, Gregory Halpern leads us through the poetically brilliant social landscape of the American rust belt. Intricately combining portraits of men with images of houses and other domestic spaces, Halpern juxtaposes masculinity, fragility and perseverance against the backdrop of one of America’s most overlooked regions.
In Annabelle, Annabelle, Caitlin Teal Price utilizes the severe and minimalistic landscape of the metropolitan city as a backdrop to construct her images of solitary women. The resulting images are meditations on age, isolation and the psychological power of the city. Juxtaposed with these photographs are images of blank spaces like highway overpasses and parking garages, further implicating the constructed landscape as a space brimming with uncertain potential.
Will Steacy’s most recent series Down These Mean Streets examines fear and abandonment residing within America’s inner cities. Utilizing the qualities of light found after dark, Steacy wanders through various regions, charting a route from the airport through the heart of the city in search of images. Leavened by a sense of loss and despair, his intentions are to create an accurate reflection of the American inner city that escapes a simple classification.
