Photography in Connecticut

This was in the ConneCT Fall Edition--CT ASMP Newsletter

Photography in Connecticut

Wadsworth Atheneum   Patti Smith:  Camera Solo October 21-February 19 The pioneering artist, musician, and poet, Patti Smith has made her mark on the American cultural landscape throughout her 40-year career, from her earliest explorations of artistic expression with friend and vanguard photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the 1960s and 70s to her profound influence on the nascent punk rock scene in the late 1970s and 80s.Patti Smith: Camera Solo will be the first museum exhibition of her photography in the United States. The exhibition will include seventy photographs, one multi-media installation and one video work. Also on view will be a number of objects depicted in the photographs along with a selection of original Polaroids. More...       Claire Beckett / MATRIX 163 November 3, 2011 - March 4, 2012  Claire Beckett's large-scale, color photographic series "Simulating Iraq" investigates the American military training sites where soldiers participate in role-playing exercises in preparation for deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. In makeshift simulations of Middle Eastern villages, military personnel and hired civilians assume the various "parts"-from Iraqi villagers and medical workers to Taliban fighters-dressed in approximations of traditional clothing, including head scarves, tunics, and robes. Although the military activities are intended to familiarize troops with a foreign culture and unknown terrain, Beckett's "documentary" photographs present the viewer with a fascinating and false alternate reality--through a straightforward but problematic account of cultural simulation charged with genuine humanity.       Westport Arts Center On Duty: Wegee Metinides Odermatt  From the Andrew and Christine Hall Collection November 18 - January 15 Opening Reception: Friday, November 18, 6 - 8pm This exhibition will feature 45 photographs by three important historic photographers - a Swiss policeman, Arnold Odermatt; a Mexican photojournalist, Enrique Metinides; and New York's Arthur Fellig, known as "Weegee." All three, while on duty in their respective professions, crossed the line of simply documenting accidents and day-to-day mayhem. The content of the imagery, often tragic, transcends the rawness of the event and moves into the realm of a modernist aesthetic that is both profound and thought provoking.  More...