Stephen Perloff is the founder and editor of The Photo Review and the editor of The Photograph Collector. He is also photographer. Here is his text:
In 1986, I had a “30 Year Retrospective” at Haverford College, as I included a picture of my parents I made at the age of 8 with my Davy Crockett camera. I actually started seriously making photographs ten years later, in 1966, and have had a lengthy career that has included a rephotographic project in Philadelphia (“Philadelphia Past and Present”), numerous other images made in the city and in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, and a multi-year study of the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, which famously had a coal mine fire burning beneath it. I have also made numerous portraits of people like photographers W. Eugene Smith and Emmet Gowin, monologist and actor Spalding Gray, feminist Kate Millet, poet Elizabeth Alexander — who read at President Obama’s inauguration — and dancer Lucas Hoving among others. Most of those photographs were made with a 4×5-inch view camera. Among my 35mm work are images made on travels to Europe and the Far East and a series of the last seven months of my father’s life titled “Dying at Home.”
But except for two SX-70s that were included in a Brooklyn Bridge centennial show in New York City in 1986, the film-based work I have exhibited has always been in black-and-white. Yet I often shot color along with black-and-white, but never really learned to print color and never exhibited this work.
However, with the advent of digital technologies I have revisited this work, scanned the Kodachrome slides, which are still pristine, and made new digital prints. I always knew there were wonderful images among my color work but after looking at them a couple of times and maybe having a slide show once in a while for a couple of friends, the work went into storage and was somewhat forgotten. I realized that with a high-quality scanner and printer I could bring these images back to life and the results have been everything I imagined.
The color work goes back to 1966, with images made in Philadelphia, at the West Virginia State Fair in 1978, on those trips to Europe, and especially to the Far East in 1977 and Romania in 1982, as well as trips cross country in 1970, 1978, and 1979.
This show will have a sampling of some 30 images, but there are many more I hope will be exhibited. That’s why I titled this exhibition “Unseen Color, Part I.” We’ll see!
Stephen Perloff
Unseen Color, Part I
Until April 14, 2012
The Light Room Gallery
2024 Wallace St.
Philadelphia, PA 19130, 215/765-0262,
