Larry Babis, Lewis Baltz, Larry Burrows, William Christenberry, Larry Clark, Jack Delano, Liz Deschenes, Disfarmer, Mitch Epstein , Walker Evans, Saul Fletcher, Phyllis Galembo, William Gedney, Jitka Hanzlová, Evelyn Hofer, William Larson, Russell Lee, Ari Marcopoulos, Roger Mertin, Joel Meyerowitz, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Joanne Mulberg, Gordon Parks, Bill Ravanesi, Stephen Scheer, Stephen Shore, Raghubir Singh, Joel Sternfeld, Annelies Strba, John Vachon, Karlheinz Weinberger, Marion Post Wolcott
Overnight to Many Cities: Tourism and Travel at Home and Away features the work of over 30 photographer’s primarily American, dating from 1940 to the present. The show includes portraits of soldiers leaving home (Disfarmer), the Vietnam Battlefield (Larry Burrows), a juxtaposition of Indian Landscapes by Mitch Epstein and Raghubhir Singh, to Snow boarders in action and hotel rooms (Ari Marcopolous). What makes a travel picture? The fact that the photographer went to a foreign place, or that the place is foreign to the viewer? Can war photography be considered part of travel, and can images of suburban sprawl have political undertones. Just as we have invested post-war German photography with a social criticality, might we not look at the work of American’s like Joel Sternfeld and Stephen Shore as critiquing the fitful development of the post Vietnam War suburbs. Hence, the exhibition’s starting point is the mid-eighties work of the New Color photographers (Sternfeld, Shore, Meyerowitz and others). Artists working before or after this generation were chosen specifically for how their works played off or against these historically crucial pictures. Seeking to expand how we look at the landscape and the results of the photographer’s movement through it, the show questions our ability to shuffle images as they bombard us in newspapers and magazines, documentary projects and the work of Post-Modern formalists. Rather than expressing a fascination with narrative cinema, the artist’s in this show seem more connected to early seventies television when the world was focused in the American living room.