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The strongest of the images in this small show draw us into Meatyard’s dreamlike world, seducing us with unexpectedly strange and macabre situations. Few photographers since have

explored these spiritual netherworlds with such visual sophistication. Seeing the three series on view here is a particular treat, as they haven’t been shown or reproduced as often as many of Meatyard’s more famous projects. Placed between singular works from the 1960s and the Lucybelle Crater series of the early 1970s, they provide an important stylistic bridge, beginning to connect together a range of separate ideas into more layered narrative forms.

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It's been said that a writer only begins a book; it is the reader who completes it. This is true of writers, but it's also especially true of a photographer like Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Indeed, as one of Meatyard’s best friends, the writer Guy Davenport once observed, many of Meatyard’s photographs are like “charming short stories that have never been written.” 

...This conversation was recorded in my home in Chicago in January 2023. Khalik was wrapping up a short residency with us at Northwestern, and we were sitting by a fire with my dog, Mogu, in the mix....

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Torward a Photography of Depth

...A discussion of Frame’s artistic work requires an understanding of the multiple influences upon his creative imagination. He draws on so many streams of awareness to fuel his aesthetic: growing up in rural Mississippi, his love of film noir and Southern gothic writers (he includes Faulkner and Williams), his experiences as a gay Southerner moving north to attend Harvard, his arrival in New York and his immersion in the downtown arts scene of the 1980s, the horror of AIDS, and the loss of so many friends. He discusses his need to express himself in a range of media: photography, film and video, plays, and essays. He describes a desire to dive deeply into the “heart of darkness” of both the personal and societal unconscious...

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Roswell Angier, whose Combat Zone photos captured part of Boston history, dies at 82

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...Roswell was an old soul who exuded curiosity, wisdom, and all-around calmness as he photographed with a compassionate but unblinking eye...

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A poignant artistic collaboration, showing how history and mythology converge in the Navajo communities in and around Gallup, New Mexico.

Taking a fresh approach to personal documentary, Gallup combines Roswell Angier's photographs, Susan Hawley's watercolor paintings, and both of their journal entries, as they explore the time they spent in Gallup, New Mexico in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Gallup is a place where histories and myths meet, and Angier and Hawley work through diverse media to portray a place where many versions of Native and American life have flowed together. They show that Gallup is both beautiful and difficult to know, in a way that reflects the long shadow of Native American disenfranchisement.

Sober about social realities, Angier and Hawley nevertheless find lighthearted humor in the daily life of Gallup. They take us from the Navajo creation story to motels, from a rodeo to an inherited suitcase of Plains Indian artifacts. Through images, we travel from Canyon de Chelly to Chaco Canyon, from fast food joints to bars. Beyond the picturesque clichés offered by the desert, full of Airstream trailers and sunsets, we find struggles over personal and group identity at one of America's crossroads, where a billboard once read “Welcome to the Indian Capital of the World.”

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Navajo cowboys impersonating John Wayne: Roswell Angier’s best photograph

‘This was taken in the Indian Head Bar, a seedy place in Arizona. The men were fascinated by Wayne since The Hallelujah Trail was filmed around there. Yet Wayne wasn’t in it.'

Before I actually went there, I knew nothing about the town of Gallup in New Mexico. I was familiar with a Robert Frank photograph of a sombre Navajo cowboy, taken surreptitiously in a bar there in the 1950s that was published in his classic book The Americans. The picture stayed with me. The place did not. But I decided to go there because of an exchange I had with my father in 1966...

image: ‘An in-between place where people collided with each other’ … Indian Head Bar, 1980 by Roswell Angier. 

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What he saved for his family

As an artist nears the end of his or her life, in addition to working through the inevitable questions of how the estate will be managed in the future, it is often the case that the artist sets aside works for family, friends, and loved ones, so that they don’t get overlooked, inadvertently sold off, or lost in the shuffle. And in the years before he died in 2014, the British photographer Roger Mayne did just this, working with gallerist Tom Gitterman to box up a selection of the last vintage prints from some of his favorite and most noted images from the 1950s, which became known as Ann's Box (for his wife Ann Jellicoe and their family). This tightly-edited show is made up of works from that personal cache, the prints having now drifted down the generations.

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