July 14 – September 15, 2016
JULY 14 – SEPTEMBER 15, 2016 in the Open Lens Gallery at Gershman Y
Opening Reception with the Artist:
THURSDAY, JULY 14
5:00 – 7:00 PM
FREE with RSVP here or call 215-545-4400
Geoffrey Ansel Agrons’ work is indebted to the intimate pictorialism of Alfred Stieglitz and the monumental images favored by Ansel Adams, while bridging the technology of the 19th century and the present day. Agrons photographs with a digital camera, produces a digital negative on transparent media using an inkjet printer, hand-coats fine art paper with a solution containing palladium salts, exposes the paper in close contact with the negative to ultraviolet light, and finally develops the latent image in the darkroom.
The palladium process yields a soft ethereal image with a wide tonal range in the highlights. Agrons also combines modern inkjet printing with hand-made Japanese paper to evoke the aura of early 19th century photographs. He sees the subtle, quiet, and romantic while remaining attuned to the fragility of an increasingly distressed modern landscape. The exhibition Melancholigraphs is a selection of unique works that span time, location, and subject but are connected by an unsettling yet serene photographic sensibility.
“The uneasy coexistence between human populations and the natural world interests me as a photographer. I am intrigued by transition and impermanence, and favor material that leaves an inchoate emotional residue – that haunting suspicion that we may have forgotten something important in our inattention to the sensual realm. I suppose most of my photographs are mementos mori (although I’ve come to think of them as melancholigraphs).” – Geoffrey Agrons
This exhibition is the first in a series of exhibitions featuring members of the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center. The exhibition is presented jointly by the Gershman Y and the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center.
