Lindsey Beal’s work usually combines history with contemporary women’s lives and feminism with historical photographic processes. She is interested in the photograph as object and often includes sculpture, papermaking and artist books into her work.

The photographs in Transmission were created using open-source imagery from the Center for Disease Control. The images are microscopic views of bacteria from sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Beal altered the images and then converted the imagery into digital negatives. From these negatives Beal made cyanotypes and embedded the prints in resin within Petri dishes.
Beal’s series, Transmission, is featured in the Griffin Gallery at the Griffin Museum of Photography July 9th through August 30th, 2015. An opening reception will take place on July 9th, 2015 from 7-8:30pm. Dave Jordano will do a talk at 5pm at the museum. The talk is free for members and $7 for nonmembers. The talks and receptions require an RSVP. Lindsey Beal will lead a members’ talk at 6:30pm before the reception. The talk and reception are free and open to the public with an RSVP.

“What once seemed like a scary yet treatable nuisance or temporary problem is becoming a major public-health concern,” says Beal. “Although we should have eradicated these long ago, bacterial STDs continue to exist. Frighteningly, they are beginning to mutate and become drug resistant; gonorrhea specifically has outgrown our current treatments,” she says. “The bacterial STDs [in exhibit] (BV, Chlamydia, Trichomonas, Gonorrhea and Syphilis) can be silent for women and have little to no symptoms for men: they reveal themselves mainly through medical tests. Without testing, the cycle continues: without noticeable symptoms, no treatments are received; without treatments, the infections are unknowingly passed to others.”

Lindsey Beal is a photographer and professor of photography at Rhode Island College and the New Hampshire Institute of Art graduate program. She received her MFA in Photography from the University of Iowa and a certificate in Book Arts at the University of Iowa as well. Her work has been shown at national museums, galleries & universities and included in various public & private collections, including the Kinsey Institute and the Indie Photobook Library. She has been featured on LensCulture, Light Leaked, & 365 Artists and has been published in Diffusion, The Hand, View Camera and 500 Handmade Books Volume Two. She recently earned a travel grant from Duke University and an Honorable Mention for Center Forward 2014 at the Center for Fine Art Photography. She resides in Rhode Island.

Courtesy of Panopticon Gallery