Joseph Bellows Gallery, based in California, offers an inventory of important vintage prints, as well as contemporary photographs. The gallery maintains a rotating exhibition schedule of both solo shows and group-themed exhibitions. In part of the AIPAD Photography Show 2015, the gallery is featuring Melissa Shook’s work with a selection of self-portraits (1972/73).
The intimate photographs created by the photographer Melissa Shook in the early 1970’s portray the artist each day, over the course of one year. Shook’s extended self-portrait combines observation and performance to reveal an arresting range of expression. The photographs display emotion and physicality in individual moments, as well as through the sum of their succession. The gallery will be exhibiting her work in a solo show this spring, as well as featuring a selection of Shook’s yearlong project at their booth at AIPAD.
Self-Portrait 1972-73
Curious about the problem of identity, I decided to photograph myself every day for a year. I was interested in the time when I would forget. The obsession with forgetting has been central. Having forgotten my mother, what she looked like, what she was like, how she treated me before she died when I was twelve, is still an abiding concern, though I have a much stronger sense of self now. But in 1972, not remembering meant, to some extent, not having existed, having to create a self without a foundation and trying to raise a daughter without remembering having been a child.
Using the Rolei on a tri-pod, I started, changing the focus each month. It was important to let my unconscious, rather than my intellect, dictate the progression. At one point, I realized that if anyone got close to me, I wanted to cover my face, so the March images alternated between close-ups of the body and the face. In the final set, I printed a pale gray square to represent the days that I forgot to take pictures.
When I look at them, I see a young woman, trapped in a body too attractive for her to manage, much less enjoy, who was battling depression and struggling like the devil not to reveal the pain she was in.
The ’72,’73 series, so important to me at the time partly because John Szarkowski bought a number of them that were shown at the Museum of Modern Art, has become one segment of work about change and aging.
Melissa Shook’s photographs have been exhibited in numerous solo and prestigious group exhibitions, including: Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography (MOMA 2010) and Photography in Boston1955- 1985(Decordova Museum). Her photographs are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Center for Creative Photography, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bibliotheque Nationale, Moderna Museet, Visual Studies Workshop and others.
INFORMATIONS
AIPAD 2015
16 – 19 April, 2015
The Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10065
USA
http://www.aipad.com
Joseph Bellows Gallery
Fine Vintage and Contemporary Photography
7661 Girard Avenue
La Jolla California 92037
United States
http://www.nailyaalexandergallery.com
