Summer Exposure: Photographic Works by Martin Benjamin, Carolyn Marks Blackwood, Tom Fels, Dana Hoey, and William Jaeger

The photographs selected by MARTIN BENJAMIN represent several periods in his artistic career, from the documentary images of his American Road Trips series shot during the early 1970s to the more recent color diptychs of Vietnam and Italy that allow Benjamin to pair images and show “uniformity within diversity.”

CAROLYN MARKS BLACKWOOD views the Hudson River from one hundred feet above the water’s surface, inside her house that is perch on the edge of a cliff. From that elevated position she witnesses the river’s ever-changing moods. The cracking and shifting ice, the mist rising from the river, sunsets, and flocks of birds assume natural, abstracted patterns in Blackwood’s photographs. The exhibition, Elements of Place, presents works that focus our attention on the Hudson River and its surrounding landscape.

In addition to curating and writing about photography, TOM FELS also creates art in various media. His Arbor Series cyanotypes, represented in the exhibition, arose from his lengthy engagement with a single subject: a tree and its dappled shadows on his house in Bennington, Vermont. The discovery of the availability of large-scale cyanotype paper in the summer of 2011 took Fels’ work in a new direction.

DANA HOEY’S fascination with aggression has led to her new series of photographs, “Love Your Enemy,” which examine fighting as an inevitable human activity. Hoey engaged a choreographer to demonstrate different methods of attack and response, and hired skilled master fighters to play out the dramatization The resulting pictures evoke “How to” manuals.