Through April 16, 2023
Rodale Gallery
If you live broadly and are curious about it all, you understand what it is about us that draws us together. It’s that kind of picture that I really like to make.
—Larry Fink
It’s such an intense pleasure to photograph strangers because, in that moment, you can see them in such an intimate way. It’s kind of crazy, but I love some of those people even though I have never seen them again.
—Judith Joy Ross
Timestamp brings together the work of Larry Fink and Judith Joy Ross, two of the most important photographers of the twentieth century, renowned for creating probing and engrossing studies of people and everyday life. This exhibition presents a selection of images by Fink and Ross from two different eras—Fink’s from the 1960s and early 1970s and Ross’s from the late 1980s and early 1990s—celebrating their distinctive approaches to portraiture and to the medium of photography itself.
There are several parallels between the careers of these illustrious artists who first met in the mid-1970s and have been friends since. Both have resided in eastern Pennsylvania for the past several decades, Fink in Martins Creek and Ross in Bethlehem, and both have received prestigious fellowships from the Guggenheim and the National Endowment for the Arts. On a more fundamental level, bringing their work into conversation highlights their shared ability to create intimate and arresting portraits of great psychological depth. And yet, their images are in many ways studies in contrast.
Despite their different compositional styles, techniques, and choices of subject matter, Fink and Ross share an instinctive aptitude for depicting the human experience with sensitivity, empathy, and authenticity. Their photographs capture portraits of people and eras, offering indelible and incisive visions of power and vulnerability, hope and despair. By doing so, they also offer us an enduring reminder of the capacity of the photograph itself as a unique narrative form.
Photo at top: Larry Fink, 12th Street, New York, NY, September 1966, gelatin silver print
Larry Fink, Twin Parks Project, New York, NY, June 1972, gelatin silver print
Judith Joy Ross, Untitled, from Eurana Park, Weatherly, Pennsylvania, 1982, gold toned printing-out paper. Allentown Art Museum: purchase, Edwin Schadt Trust Fund, 1997
_______________________________________________________________________
Timestamp is supported through the generosity of The Bernard and Audrey Berman Foundation and Leon C. and June W. Holt Endowment.