On Seeing | Nancy Scherl & Suzanne Revy – Artist Talk

© Nancy Scherl, Arthur Griffin Legacy Award

Nancy Scherl is a fine art portrait photographer based in New York City. Stylistically, Nancy emulates cinema verité, particularly for her portrait series, often posing her subjects, offering subtle direction, and asking them to “act out” what they experience when they’re in a specific setting. The setting is frequently enhanced with formal lighting to create a specific ambience. Her portraits often invoke metaphor and social commentary. *(Though Nancy blurs the boundaries between pictorial, social documentary and street genres in much of her work, she distinguishes between her staged portrait series and her visual stories –the former being cinema verite’ applying social commentary; the latter being social documentary.)

She draws from Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment.” Her camerawork may include a predetermined background and sometimes controlled lighting, but she will capture her subjects more spontaneously, once they appear within her camera frame. Nancy refers to her reality-based narratives as being staged or partially staged realities.

She also creates fictional narratives, which she refers to as staged fantasies. As a provocateur, she lures viewers into her scientifically impossible visual worlds, designed to intrigue viewers into considering anew their formerly trusted points of view and aspects of the human condition.

Nancy completed an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media at New York City’s School of Visual Arts, following her undergraduate studies in documentary and fine art photography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a member of the American Society of Media Photographers, where she served as a board member from 2016 to 2019, and currently serves as President emerita and Treasurer, on the board of the Katonah Museum Artists’ Association (KMAA) in Katonah, New York. She is the Founder, and Producer of Coffee SHOP-TALK which is a round table discussion series about art, produced for the KMAA.

Scherl is the recipient of many awards and has exhibited globally including at FotoNostrum Mediterranean House of Photography, PX3 Espace Beaurepaire, A Smith Gallery, Praxis Gallery, South X Southeast, The Katonah Museum of Art and the Hammond Museum.

About Suzanne Revy –

© Suzanne Revy, Griffin Prize

After graduating from high school in Los Angeles, Suzanne Révy moved to Brooklyn, NY and earned a BFA in photography from the Pratt Institute where she was immersed in making and printing black and white photographs. Following art school she worked as a photography editor for U.S.News & World Report magazine in Washington, DC and later as acting picture editor for Yankee magazine in Dublin, NH. With the arrival of two sons, she left the world of publishing and began to make pictures of her children, their cousins, and friends rekindling her interest in making and printing black and white pictures in a traditional wet darkroom. 

The resulting monochrome series, Time Let Me Play is an exploration of the nature and culture of childhood and childhood play. A second portfolio, To Venerate the Simple Days, was made using a simple plastic camera with color film; it pictured the time spent during the summers with her pre-teen aged children. The images represent an emotional response to that brief moment between childhood and adulthood. She continued to work with color film in the final series of visual family diaries, I Could Not Prove the Years Had Feet. This last portfolio was begun while earning her MFA in photography from the New Hampshire Institute of Art, and it chronicled the shifts and changes of her growing boys as they navigated their teen years.

While pursuing her MFA, she anticipated the imminent departure of her children, so she turned her attention to the mundane in a series of mobile phone images featured in A Certain Slant of Light. This led to an interest in making landscape diptychs and triptychs using medium format and color film in a new series titled A Murmur in the Trees.

 Her work has been shown at the Newport Art Museum in Newport, RI, the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA, the Fitchburg Art Museum in Fitchburg, MA, the Danforth Art Museum, and the Garner Center Gallery at the New England School of Photography among others. She teaches at Clark University, is the Associate Editor for the online magazine What Will You Remember? and serves on the Board of the Photographic Resource Center in Cambridge, MA.

Révy lives with her family in suburban Boston, MA.