Griffin Gallery

Imagine a world where it doesn’t matter who you love, just that you love. 

An Impossibly Normal Life is an artifact from another world, a more loving, inclusive one where who you love is of little societal importance. This fictional story, centered on my imagined uncle’s idealized life, is created from collected vintage snapshots from around the world. 

Four years ago, my mother offhandedly mentioned that I had an uncle who may have been gay, but he died not long after I was born. Hearing this revelation for the first time, nearly thirty years after I had struggled to come out to my disapproving family, sent my mind spinning. The thought of a family member so close to me going through some of the same things I did inspired me to create this story. 

Instead of returning to the hiding or shame of most pre-1970’s queer stories, a reality of how our world was (and in some cases, still is), I have created an alternate history where fluidity in gender and sexuality is the societal norm. Re-contexualizing found photographs and creating a new narrative, my Uncle Ken’s life becomes full of acceptance, friends and love, and shows anyone struggling with identity today the joy of what could have been and can still be.

About Matthew Finley

Based in Los Angeles, Matthew Finley’s work has shown in solo and group shows in galleries across the U.S. He has pieces in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago, MOAH, Lancaster, and the Center for Fine Art Photography. His current project An Impossibly Normal Life recently received Center Santa Fe’s 2024 Personal Award as well as the Center for Photographic Art’s 2024 LGBTQ+ Artist Grant.

To learn more, please visit Matthew’s website at: http://mfinleyphoto.com/

The Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture is a $20,000 prize awarded annually to a photographer whose work demonstrates a compelling new vision in photographic portraiture. The Prize is generously funded by the Arnold & Augusta Newman Foundation and proudly administered by Maine Media Workshops + College.

The Griffin Museum is pleased to present an exhibition to honor the winner for the Newman Prize, Camille Farrah Lenain.

“Made Of Smokeless Fire” is an homage to my uncle Farid, who passed away in 2013. In the absence of his voice, I turned my lens toward LGBTQIA+ individuals of Muslim culture in France, often underrepresented and simply ignored. France is home to the largest proportion of Muslims in the Western world, estimated at 8.8% or the population, or 5.57 million. Yet, islamophobia remains pervasive. At the intersection of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, and racism, queer Muslims are actively challenging these inequities, while redefining their own cultural and religious heritage.

While some individuals have cut ties with their families, others have reinterpreted the Qur’an, found ways to heal with their parents, nurtured supportive community spaces in France. There is no singular narrative. By melding photography with personal testimonies transformed into poem-portraits, this project disrupts stereotypes, unveils the unspoken aggressions in France, and celebrates the nuanced resilience of its participants.

In France, there seems to be a reluctance to acknowledge the realities of racism. The term “race” was removed from the constitution in 2018 and the universalist mindset often echoes the phrase : “I don’t see color”. However, racism is deeply embedded in French society, as evidenced by the near victory of the far-right in the June 2024 parliamentary elections. This denial serves only to silence a pressing issue : by refusing to confront it, many pretend it does not exist.

Queer Muslim communities often exist in the shadows, either through a lack of representation or a conscious choice to remain unseen. How do we photograph the invisible? How can we honor identities while respecting their secrets? What modes of representation can we develop for undefined, queer, and plural stories? How can we soften a medium that has historically been violent in its classification of human identities?

The month of May 2023 marked 10 years since my uncle’s death. Opening up our memories and traumas can almost be redemptive, leading us to question our imposed narratives of faith, survival, family and love. This body of work has become a necessity for me, a tunnel for examining the trauma of silence surrounding queer lives. With secrets tied in loss of memory due to immigration, colonial history, and assimilation, this work has evolved into not only an homage to Farid but to queered and racialized bodies – bodies in liminality.

About Camille Farrah Lenain

Camille Farrah Lenain is a French-Algerian documentary and portrait photographer who grew up in Paris, studied Photography at l’ESA in Brussels and at ICP in New York City (virtual). She relocated to New Orleans in 2013, where she photographs for her community, teaches at Tulane University and works on long-term projects that challenges societal preconception, exploring the notions of stereotypes and plural identities. With a passion for sound and interviews, she also creates immersive sound pieces and recordings alongside her projects.

Camille’s photographs have been exhibited internationally, including at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Arab World Institute, Festival Incadaques and Photoville. She was previously an Artist-in-Residence at the Joan Mitchell Center and Center of Photography in Woodstock.

See more of Camille‘s work on her website, and on social media @​camille.lenain​

A 29th Annual Member’s Juried Exhibition prize winner, Lynne Breitfeller mesmerized us with her haunting black and white images, engaging in us the mystery of what is and what was. Learning the story behind them engaged us more, bringing technical process, along with emotion and loss and renewal as new objects to the conversation we have with these images. We are thrilled to fill the Griffin Gallery with this work, and produce a catalog of the images and text to be available during the exhibition.

After the Fire: Water Damaged, explores photographs as memory by examining the shape-shifting potential of altered images. As a result of a fire above my studio, water impacted my negatives destroying a third of my archive. Much was discarded, but I retained a collection of the work.

During the pandemic, I rediscovered the kept artifacts. Water on emulsion transformed their compositions and morphed the remains into new forms and meanings shaped by happenstance.

By working with the damaged pieces, I came to terms with the loss of my photographic legacy and saw the images anew.  The memory of what was had shifted into something different. Our experience of remembering the past can change each time it is revisited, it is elastic.

This series made me consider ideas of transience and new incarnations, the impermanence of possessions, and memory.

About Lynne Breitfeller

Lynne Breitfeller is a photographer who explores human relationships, memory, loss, transience, and humor in her work. In the series After the Fire: Water Damaged, she examines the shape-shifting potential of altered images. The title refers to the fire that occurred above the artist’s studio, which destroyed her archive. The photographs were forever altered by water on emulsion and transformed into new forms and meanings through happenstance. The physical alteration of these images reflect the idea that our experience of remembering the past can change each time it is revisited. Lynne Breitfeller states, this series made her “consider ideas of transience and new incarnations, the impermanence of possessions, and memory.” The exhibition invites the viewer to reconsider the elasticity of memory and discover new meanings out of “damaged” photographs.

Lynne Breitfeller lives in New Jersey. She received her B.A. in English from William Paterson University and studied photography at the International Center for Photography (NY), Los Angeles Center for Photography (CA), and Maine Media College (MA). After a two-decade career in text book publishing, she returned to the visual arts. Her work has been exhibited at The Griffin Museum of Photography (MA), Center for Fine Art Photography and Colorado Photographic Arts Center (CO), Vermont Center for Photography (VT), Los Angeles Center for Photography, and Marin Museum of Contemporary Art (CA), and Montclair Art Museum (NJ) amongst others. She was recognized in Photolucida’s 2023 Critical Mass Top 50, received first place in Soho Photo National Competition 2023, and was a finalist 2022 Lucie Foundation’s Open Call 2022, Portrait Category. Her work has been featured in Lenscratch, Fotofilmic, Analog Forever, Silvergrain Classics, SHOTS, and All About Photo magazines.

Ileana Doble Hernandez‘s socially conscious and interdisciplinary practice includes photography, video and experimental installations. She sees her practice as a form of activism. Ileana creates multimedia projects that explore issues of gun culture, immigration and the imperialistic practices of the United States, from her perspective as a mother and as an immigrant from Mexico, living in the U.S. for more than a decade. She’s interested in the use of art as a way to provoke and challenge viewer’s preconceived representations. By combining non-traditional methods and materials, Ileana explores ways in which artist and audience collaborate. Through her postcards installation more than 500 postcards have been mailed to U.S. elected officials advocating for gun control. Since 2020 She’s been collaborating with Imaginary Lines Project, an ongoing socially engaged artistic endeavor that allows people to share their immigration journey through the U.S./Mexico border. Her works are part of public and private collections and have been published and exhibited in galleries and museums in North America, Europe and Asia. Ileana is a Studio Resident at the Boston Center for the Arts, a 2023 Boston Arts and Business Council Fellow, a 2021 National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Fellow, and the 2019 College of Art and Design Outstanding Graduate Student from Rochester Institute of Technology.

Los Gringos In elementary school I learned that the American continent is only one, it’s not divided between north and south. For us, people of the United States are not Americans, because America is a continent, not a country. “Los Gringos” is a series of street photographs; some of them taken at parades and marches, with whatever camera available, over the more than twelve years that I’ve been living in the U.S. as an immigrant.What I like more about a photograph is that its meaning depends on the context in which it is experienced and on what it is juxtaposed with. When put together, I see these pictures in a very special way, almost as a diary of “America”. By juxtaposing these as diptychs I point to my nuanced perspective and to situations that feel intertwined. A clash between classes, races, genders and beliefs is still present, as it was many years ago, when Robert Frank took the road.

Pollage (Political + Collage) is a growing body of work of small collage pieces made completely analog and their counterparts as transparencies on lightboxes. At my studio, I browse magazines for hours, cutting pieces of pages (pictures or text) that ‘speak to me’. All these clippings go into my red lid box of cutouts, until ready to be summoned. With time, topics start to emerge in my mind, as I make relations by remembering imagery or phrases that I’ve cut out and relate with a topic I’m interested in. It is then when I start putting things together on a page. 

“Let us tell their stories, learn our history and remember the lost possibilities of every life cut short.” 

                                                       – Governor General of Canada 

Trees are known for their sturdy trunks and far reaching limbs. So much so, trees are often used as the veritable symbol of strength, kinship and even life itself.  Yet, even the hardiest trees are often felled by man or disease, pushed to the wayside and ultimately forgotten.   This photographic series reveals the faces of wooded life cut short. Raggedly severed cross sections pose as portraits of once majestic tree forms.  The cross sections expose the anatomy, and in so doing, the passage of time and clues to conditions throughout their lifetime.  Seeing white as black, and black as white further reveals the structures that supported the tree and life itself. The “group” images suggest the delicate balance of this precious life form so vulnerable to the whims of humankinds endless thirst 

We came to this photographic project with some degree of guilt and even regret.  At the behest of our town, with a building permit in the offing, we removed an outcropping of “non-native” redwood trees.  The portraits of trees “cut short” is our tribute to the four sturdy, carbon reducing, one time inhabitants of our property. 

About Ellen Konar & Steve Goldband

Ellen and Steve are life partners and collaborators in fine art photography. Their co-productions are often strong geometries in muted tones, evidencing Steve’s eye for geometry and light, elevated by Ellen’s interest in memory, meaning, and color. The translucency and mystery of their images are heightened by their embrace of the imperfection-laden beauty of Japanese Kozo papers and the infusion of encaustic wax. The resultant images quietly draw the viewer into the complex and tension-filled interactions between humans and the natural world.
Their images have appeared at galleries and museums such as the Center for Photographic Arts, Carmel, The Griffin Museum of Photography, Boston, Soho Photo Gallery, NYC, Corden|Potts Gallery, SF, Berkeley Art Center, Gray Loft Gallery, Oakland, Awagami Museum, Tokyo, Lenswork Magazine, and The Forward. Awards include selection as a Critical Mass Finalist in 2020 and semi-finalist in the Awagami International Mini Print Exhibition. Steve and Ellen received PhD’s in Psychology and were contributors to the emergence of the digital age during their work at tech giants including Apple, IBM, Intel, and Google.

About Cody Bratt

Cody Bratt (b. 1982) is a San Francisco-born and based artist. His father, a photoengraver, and his mother, a multimedia artist, inspired his love of photography and book making, in particular. He holds a BA in Rhetoric with a formal concentration in Narrative and Image from the University of California, Berkeley (2005). Shying away from a literal approach, Cody’s photography employs primarily non-linear emotional or psychological approaches to exploring subjects and concepts. Unreliable memories, displacement, loss and coming of age feature centrally in Cody’s work.

He has exhibited internationally at Athens Photo Festival, Berlin Art Week, Month of Photography Los Angeles, Griffin Museum of Photography, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, ICP Museum, Brighton Photo Fringe, Filter Photo Festival amongst others. Cody is a 2016 LensCulture Emerging 50 Talent, 2018 PDN 30 nominee and 2019 Review Santa Fe attendee. His most recent series, THE OTHER STORIES, was honored with a 2020 CENTER Awards Director’s Choice Award and a 2020 Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 distinction. Cody’s first monograph, LOVE WE LEAVE BEHIND, debuted by Fraction Editions in 2018. That series was awarded a 2018 Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 distinction, named as a finalist for the 2016 Duke University CDS/Honickman First Book Prize and had images selected and published as winners in American Photography 34 (2018).

His work is in public and private collections in several states across the US, as well as Europe. Cody’s work has been published worldwide in print and online venues including PDN, LENSCRATCH, LensCulture, Lomography Magazine, iGNANT, Gente Di Fotografia, Blur Magazine, Aint-Bad, and Float Magazine amongst others.

Roland Barthes asserts that “a photograph is a witness [to] what has been. Every image is an image of death.” But Barthes is wrong. A photograph may speak to a moment now past if that is what is desired. But a photograph can create its own energy as well. Like Cezanne’s paintings, it can live; it can breathe.

I use my camera to create life and to defy death. My goal is create living works of art that embody the moment when mass becomes energy. They are never constructed. Everything in them is real.

These images capture a moment of transcendence. In that moment, we know ourselves to be infinite, inextricably a part of the universe. We perceive that, when we die, we will merely change in form. Nothing is ever lost. The energy of those we loved exists forever all around us. And we will too.

E=mc²

About Fern Nesson –

Fern L. Nesson is a fine art photographer who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She received her MFA in Photography from Maine Media College (2018), a J.D. from Harvard Law School (1971.) She has had solo exhibitions abroad at the Politecnico University in Torino, Italy, Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, France, Ph21 Gallery in Budapest, Hungary, the University of The West Indies in Jamaica and in the United States at the MIT Museum Lab, The MetaLab at Harvard, the Beacon Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts, the Pascal Gallery in Rockport, Maine, and Through This Lens Gallery in Durham, NC.

Nesson’s solo show, Tilt!, will open in September, 2023 at the Beacon Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts. Additionally, Nesson’s work has been selected for numerous juried
exhibitions in the U.S., Barcelona, Rome and Budapest. Her photobooks, Signet of Eternity and WORD, won 10th and the 12th Annual Photobooks Awards from the Davis-Orton Gallery.

How does one move through life with the scars of the past? When I was ten, my mother died unexpectedly from a heart attack. I couldn’t understand where she went or when she would return. Just as I began to comprehend this loss, my father died. I was without support from my family and community. I was lost.

Without a Map reimagines this time that’s deeply rooted in my memories. Visiting my childhood home, synagogue and family plot provided an entry into this personal retelling. Working with family photos, creating new images from my past and turning the camera on myself, I found the means to evoke, reinterpret and address unanswered questions born from early imprints that were buried long ago.

About Marsha Guggenheim