The New Photography series shows the work of photographers of talent and achievement who may be unfamiliar to the Museum’s audience. Statistically such photographers are likely to be young, but old age in itself would not be a bar to inclusion.
Paul D’Amato received his B.A. from Reed College in 1980 and his M.F.A. from Yale in 1985. He has worked as an architectural photographer and draftsman, and has taught photography at Columbia College in Chicago. He currently teaches at the Portland School of Art in Maine. During the past three years D’Amato has concentrated on photographing the children and adolescents of urban working-class neighborhoods. His pictures discover in their lives an enviable quality of subtle pageantry and drama. Or perhaps this quality is lent to the subject by the picture.
Carl Pope studied photography at Southern Illinois University and is currently a professional photographer in Indianapolis. By combining a number of exposures in a single work he proposes to express more complex meanings, and produce a more boldly expressive physical character than he could achieve within the boundaries of a single frame. These combinations are formed according to two distinct strategies: in Men, Women, Children the picture’s component parts are coherent yet independent; in The Picture of My Career they are wholly subservient to a cumulative meaning.
JoAnn Verburg studied sociology at Ohio Wesleyan University and photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She later served as both coordinator of and a photographer for the Rephotographic Survey Project, which rephotographed the sites of nineteenth-century landscape photographs. The Museum first acquired Verburg’s work in 1983, and has included it in two previous exhibitions. Her pictures describe spaces and moments suspended in the reverie that precedes action. Like the Leyden Jar, they are containers of potential.
John Szarkowski, Director, Department of Photography
