May 20, 2021
7 PM EST
Traub and Barberie will trace some of the themes and motivations of Traub’s body of work over the past two decades including his projects in Philadelphia and in China, where he lived for a decade. A number of these images, curated by Barberie, are included in the current exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art – New Grit: Art & Philly Now.
Peter Barberie is the Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Since 2008 he has organized more than twenty-five exhibitions, including WILD: Michael Nichols (2017), a survey of Nichols’ photography of the natural world creatively installed with art on similar themes from across the Museum’s collection; Three Photographers/Six Cities (2016), featuring work by Akinbode Akinbiyi, Seydou Camara and Ananias Léki-Dago; Paul Strand: Master of Modern Photography (2014), an in-depth retrospective of Strand’s photography and films that traveled to several European venues; and Zoe Strauss: Ten Years (2012), a mid-career survey of Strauss’s photography and her closely related efforts at public engagement. More recently he completed a survey exhibition and publication about the photographer David Lebe which opened in February 2019 and received broad critical praise. He is currently part of a team of curators who organized the exhibition New Grit: Art & Philly Now, which will be on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from May 7 until August 22. His publications include Looking at Atget (2005); Dreaming in Black and White: Photography at the Julien Levy Gallery (2006); Zoe Strauss: Ten Years (2012); Paul Strand: Master of Modern Photography (2014); Long Light: Photographs by David Lebe (2019); and an essay for the exhibition catalogue Charles Marville, Photographer of Paris (ed. Sarah Kennel, published by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, with University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Daniel Traub is a Philadelphia-based photographer and filmmaker. His photographic work looks at the ways in which historical and geopolitical strains and divisions manifest themselves in the landscape. Some of his projects include Little North Road, a document of the activities on a pedestrian bridge in the southern Chinese coastal metropolis of Guangzhou; Nablus, a study of the West Bank Palestinian town; and North Philadelphia, an investigation of the largely African American section of the city where he was born and raised.
Traub’s films, both short and feature-length documentaries, explore how societal and familial tensions impact the individual. These include Into Her Own, a biography of the artist Ursula von Rydingsvard; Xu Bing: Phoenix, which follows the creation of two monumental sculptures built from Beijing construction debris; and Barefoot Artist which follows the work of his mother Lily Yeh and her collaborative art projects in marginalized communities.
His photographs have been shown internationally, including exhibitions at the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago, Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, Germany and the Shanghai Center for Photography (SCoP). His work can be found in public collections, such as the Margulies Collection at the WAREhOUSE, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He has produced two monographs published by Kehrer Verlag: North Philadelphia (2014) and Little North Road (2015). His films have been shown at venues including Vancouver International Film Festival, Film Forum in NYC, Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA).
Support for Thursday Night Photo Talks is provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Artist fees for the Thursday Night Photo Talks have been underwritten by The Lillian F. and Jerome L. Sindler Fund for Visual Media.
