Summer Exposure: Photographic Works by Martin Benjamin, Carolyn Marks Blackwood, Tom Fels, Dana Hoey, and William Jaeger

June 28, 2014–September 7, 2014

Works from five photographers come together this summer at the Albany Institute. The exhibition, Summer Exposure: Photographic Works by Martin Benjamin, Carolyn Blackwood, Tom Fels, Dana Hoey, and William Jaeger, offers five uniquely different ventures into photographic vision, media, and artistic conception. Each photographer has been given the freedom to select the content for his or her own exhibition. For Hoey and Fels that meant focusing on a single series, and for Blackwood, the single theme "elements of place." The content selected by both Benjamin and Jaeger offer retrospective overviews of each photographer's work. In total, the variety of subject matter and photographic mediums makes for an exciting summer of discovery.

The photographs selected by MARTIN BENJAMIN represent several periods in his artistic career, from the documentary images of his American Road Trips series shot during the early 1970s to the more recent color diptychs of Vietnam and Italy that allow Benjamin to pair images and show “uniformity within diversity.”

CAROLYN MARKS BLACKWOOD views the Hudson River from one hundred feet above the water’s surface, inside her house that is perch on the edge of a cliff. From that elevated position she witnesses the river’s ever-changing moods. The cracking and shifting ice, the mist rising from the river, sunsets, and flocks of birds assume natural, abstracted patterns in Blackwood’s photographs. The exhibition, Elements of Place, presents works that focus our attention on the Hudson River and its surrounding landscape.

In addition to curating and writing about photography, TOM FELS also creates art in various media. His Arbor Series cyanotypes, represented in the exhibition, arose from his lengthy engagement with a single subject: a tree and its dappled shadows on his house in Bennington, Vermont. The discovery of the availability of large-scale cyanotype paper in the summer of 2011 took Fels’ work in a new direction.

DANA HOEY’S fascination with aggression has led to her new series of photographs, “Love Your Enemy,” which examine fighting as an inevitable human activity. Hoey engaged a choreographer to demonstrate different methods of attack and response, and hired skilled master fighters to play out the dramatization The resulting pictures evoke “How to” manuals.

WILLIAM JAEGER is both a writer and a photographer living in Albany, New York. The exhibition includes works from various periods in Jaeger’s career and depicts recognizable places in the Hudson Valley as well as views from farther afield. His series “Short Stories” is a study in time and space, the seizing of time’s ever-constant march forward. Jaeger recently began experimenting with video, which he likens to long-exposure photographs.