KOSS GALLERY | AUGUST 14–NOVEMBER 30, 2008

Opening Reception with Book Signing

THURSDAY, AUGUST 14

GALLERY TALK | 6 P.M.

RECEPTION | 6:30–8 P.M.

Walk through the exhibition with artists John Shimon & Julie Lindemann and curator Lisa Hostetler. Then join them in the Baumgartner Galleria for a reception with a book signing, hors d’oeuvres, and cash bar. Free with general admission. Sponsored by the Photography Council.

Wisconsin photographers John Shimon & Julie Lindemann have made a career of conflating the contemporary with the historical. In the portraits that form the bulk of their oeuvre, the subjects are people who pass through their lives. Most of their pictures are made using labor-intensive photographic techniques such as the gum bichromate and platinum-palladium processes favored by turn-of-the-twentieth-century Pictorialist photographers. The result: rich and subtly modulated prints with deep resonances in the history of portraiture. Further, these prints focus our attention on the correspondences and disparities between personality and its representation in photographs.

For the exhibition, the artists collaborated with Associate Curator of Photographs Lisa Hostetler to select forty-three portraits from among their works, as well as fifty-four from the Museum’s photographs collection. By interrogating the conventions, history, and abiding presentness of photographic portraiture, the show examines the temporal interrelationship between photography and the portrayal of individuality. A catalogue accompanies the exhibition with essays by Shimon & Lindemann and Lisa Hostetler.

Sponsored by the West Foundation, with additional support provided by the Richard and Ethel Herzfeld Foundation. This exhibition was organized by the Museum and curated by Lisa Hostetler, associate curator of photographs, in collaboration with the artists.