Griffin Gallery

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

Before social media and the instant upload of images and information, the ability to craft a story, define a narrative was simpler. Time was malleable, able to help and hinder real time reporting. A delay in reporting could be helpful in creating distractions or competing news stories. In 1998, President Bill Clinton was embroiled in scandal and looking to change the story. A trip to China was planned to distract from real time reporting, and show the strength of the Clinton Presidency overseas.

Jeffrey Aaronson was given an assignment by a major publication to follow the press as they covered President Clinton’s 1998 overseas trip to China, tasked with photographing the press as they followed the president. His photo story was not the images we saw of the President meeting with world leaders, taking a trip on the Li River, or meeting with environmentalists. It was Aaronson’s view of the press coverage and the stagecraft of the trip that became the focus of his lens. His photographs from that trip become a tale of how to build a story within a story, working to contain the vision and perception of the strength and power of the presidency, showcase our stature across the world and redefine the past, while reinterpreting the present.

About Jeffrey Aaronson –

Jeffrey Aaronson was born in Hollywood and raised in southern California. He attended the University of California Santa Barbara and upon graduating moved to Aspen, Colorado where he purchased his first camera. Soon after he began photographing, Jeffrey met mentors, Ernst Haas and Franz Berko, both pioneers in the art of color photography, who supported and encouraged his passion.

Jeffrey’s photographic career began in world of magazines where he worked on assignment for numerous publications from Vanity Fair and TIME to Rolling Stone and The New York Times Magazine. In 2001 he chose a new direction, departing from the tradition of documentary work and moving to a more narrative and conceptually based approach. Since that transition, he has devoted all his energy to long-term personal art projects, which allow him to express a more private vision.

Aaronson’s work has been exhibited in the US, Europe and the Middle East and is represented in numerous private and public collections. In January 2011, Aaronson was recognized by the Forward Thinking Museum as Artist of the Year for his series, Borderland. In addition, Borderland was nominated for the Santa Fe Prize in 2008 as well as selected for Critical Mass’s Top 50. This same work was also included in a group exhibition, HomeLessHome, at the Museum on the Seam in Jerusalem. In 2011 his series Driving Desire was nominated for the Santa Fe Prize and in 2012, work from Driving Desire was exhibited at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and purchased for their permanent collection.

Our shared and common humanity is assumed but not always evident. Making work inspired from my own personal experiences, I look for ways to further and deepen our thoughts on this connection.

In Embrace, Los Angeles based photographer Rohina Hoffman reflects on the theme of uncertainty while combining two of her photographic projects. In Gratitude, made during the pandemic, is a typology of portraits celebrating food and family and how we find comfort in times of unease. Generation 1.75 is a visual memoir of identity, belonging, and the complexities of acculturation.

About Rohina –

Rohina is a fine art photographer whose practice uses portraiture and the natural world to investigate themes of identity, home, adolescence and the female experience.

Born in India and raised in New Jersey, Rohina grew up in a family of doctors spanning three generations. While an undergraduate at Brown University, Rohina also studied photography at the Rhode Island School of Design and she was a staff photographer for the Brown Daily Herald. A graduate of Brown University Medical School and resident at UCLA Medical Center, her training led to a career as a neurologist.

A skilled observer of her patients, Rohina was instilled with a deep and unique appreciation of the human experience. Her ability to forge the sacred trust between doctor and patient has been instrumental in fostering a parallel connection between photographer and subject.

Rohina published her first monograph Hair Stories with Damiani Editore (February 2019) accompanied by a solo exhibition at Brown University’s Alpert Medical School. Her monograph, Hair Stories, is held in many notable public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Getty, Cleveland Institute of Art, and over twenty-five university libraries.

Her second monograph, Embrace, with Schilt Publishing was just released October 2022 (Europe) and January 2023 (U.S.).

In 2021, she was the winner of the Altanta Photography Group’s Purchase Award and several of her prints were acquired by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia.

Her photographs have been exhibited in juried group shows both nationally and internationally in venues such as The Center for Fine Art Photography, Griffin Museum, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Los Angeles Center for Photography, Photo LA,  and A. Smith Gallery. She has received numerous awards and has been published in Marie Claire Italia, F-Stop Magazine, The Daily Beast, Lenscratch, Shots Magazine, and Edge of Humanity among others. She lives with her husband, three children and two golden retrievers in Los Angeles.

Intimacies: Selections from the Always Been Collection celebrates Black selfhood and joy as seen through the lens of found photography. Presenting found photographic artifacts lost from their original families, Intimacies puts forth an often overlooked form of Black visual representation. Offered in the anonymous album pages, snapshots, and photobooth images of the Always Been collection is a unique form of visual agency–freed from the prevalent, dominating white gaze. Situated primarily in the first half of the 20th century, Intimacies shows the collective action of Black families to visually cement their kinship, achievements, and being in a state of constant political persecution and separation. 

Parker Thompson is a photographic researcher, collector, and student based between Charleston, South Carolina, and Waltham, Massachusetts. He is the curator behind Always Been, an archival project focused on the humanity, dignity, and joy of Black life as seen through the lens of found photographs. He is currently studying history at Brandeis University.

The photographic objects in this exhibition – chemigrams, gelatin silver prints, photograms, lumen prints and polaroids – oscillate between light and darkness, representational and abstract, and ephemeral and permanent. Links between disparate photographs are evidenced by stains and traces of chemistry, repeated imagery, and formal elements such as color and shape. I utilize these visual aesthetics to describe durational time, the layering of experiences, personal and collective loss, and the tension between image and object.

By creating images that will ultimately disappear or deteriorate into something else, I seek to challenge established notions of process, permanence and completion. What does it mean to make a photograph that is purposely fugitive? How can one utilize the materiality of the photographic medium to describe loss? Can the process by which the work is created become the work itself? Although the images do not directly address such questions, I view the work as a lyrical rendering of photography’s singular ability to visually depict essential truths about our lived experiences, evidenced by the creation of unique, non-reproducible objects imbued with marks and confirmation of their own existence.

Alyssa Minahan utilizes photographic materials, including unfixed gelatin silver paper and large format negatives, in non-traditional ways to express ideas integral to the medium of photography, specifically its complex relationship to time, space and memory. Minahan has released two publications with Datz Press, an end and a beginning (2022) and NOTES (2019). Her books are held in the collections of The New York Public Library, International Center for Photography Library, Amon Carter Museum of American Art Research Library and Stanford University Library, amongst others. Minahan has exhibited her work at numerous galleries and museums, including the Datz Museum of Art (Gwangju, South Korea), Center for Creative Photography (Tucson, Arizona), Pingyao International Photography Festival (Shanxi, China), Photographic Center Northwest (Seattle, Washington) and Boston University Art Galleries (Boston, Massachusetts). In 2021, she was awarded artist residencies at the Penumbra Foundation Workspace Program and Studios at MASS MoCA.

About A Facefull of Mangos –

With this photographic series, I present to the viewer a resistance to systemic racism and also a window into understanding what makes us human. I hope that by showing imagery of touch, warmth, laughter, and love, I may begin to unravel and break down any preconceived notions or ideas that do not give resonance to those qualities in regards to Blackness in the mind of the viewer. I am desperately attempting to declare my own humanity and have it recognized by others. By showing the gentle side of our human nature I am hopeful that the viewers will recognize their own familial behaviors and interactions, thus bridging gaps that are set by race, ethnicity, nationality, culture, and economic social-political forces. This work desires to deconstruct and challenge the mainstream historical imagery that has described Blackness in a light that wasn’t its own. I hope that the importance of these images are not only determined by what they express visually or culturally but also by the fact that they are documents of the human capacity to care for and feel empathy towards one another. Most importantly, the purpose of this work is to create empathy among people by showing the human aptitude to love. In the Bible, it is said that at the tower of Babel, God, frustrated and threatened by the power of human cooperation, fractured our language so that we could no longer understand each other and work together. And while an ancient story that reverberates with myth, the essence of this still rings true. That when we work together, not even the heavens will be the limit of our greatness. That God himself will pale in comparison to the vastness of our achievements. If only we could work together, we could become so much more. It is as the writer Eric Williams once said, “Together we aspire, together we achieve.” – JME

About Justin Michael Emmanuel –

Born in Hartford, CT, in 1995, Justin-Michael Emmanuel is a mixed media artist that primarily uses photography and the written word to explore ideas of family, love, and blackness. Justin was first exposed to photography in 2015 during his time at Hampshire College where he received both the David E. Smith and Elaine Mayes fellowship awards for his photographic work on Afrofuturism. He then completed a master of fine arts degree at the University of Hartford Art School in 2021 where he also won the Stanley Fellman Award for his graduate thesis work A Facefull of Mangos. Photographs from that series have been included in group exhibitions at the Chrysler Museum of Art, The Center for Photographers of Color, and the Joseloff Gallery. Justin currently resides in Quincy, MA, where he continues to make photographs that critically engage with his community. By using the camera to show our human aptitude to love, Justin hopes that his photographs will help give people the tools they need to shape the world around them.