Announcing
A Peculiar Paradise: Photographs by Nathan Benn
On View: February 22 - April 20, 2019Opening Reception and Book Signing: Friday, February 22nd, 5–7pm
photo-eye Bookstore + Project Space
1300 Rufina Circle, Suite A3, Santa Fe, NM 87507
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
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| Nathan Benn, Space Tourists, 1981, Archival Pigment Print, 15x20" Image, Edition of 15, $2800 |
ABOUT THE ARTWORK
A Peculiar Paradise by Nathan Benn shows its subject—Benn’s homestate—at the dawn of the 1980s, during a time when Florida’s only true constant was change. Although some regions rested like the state’s alligators, staid and satisfied, other areas became a hotbed for the narcotics trade and a hub for Caribbean and South American immigration. This increasing cultural diversity (Miami’s English-speaking Caucasian population was in free fall, from 84% in 1950 to just 12% by 1990), and the state’s innate peculiarity is captured here with the keen sense of an anthropologist and the glint-in-the-eye of a local.
The pictures, fittingly, sometimes feel urgent, sometimes leisurely. Kodachrome film's distinctive color palette seems tailor-made to its purpose here, displayed to full effect with expressive composition and sumptuous texture. Benn's vibrant, idiosyncratic images reflect the charming, sometimes dangerous, chaos of Florida at the time, a place that came to embody both the quintessence of suburban Americana and the depth of the melting pot, and the source of Benn's own nostalgic longing.
– powerHouse Books
"With a uniquely American mix of formality and ease, and a color palette so tart you can almost taste it, Benn makes the past vividly — even painfully — present."
— VINCE ALETTI, PHOTOGRAPHY CRITIC, THE NEW YORKER
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| Nathan Benn, Spaceship Earth, 1981, Archival Pigment Print, 15x21" Image, Edition of 15, $2800 |
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Nathan Benn was born and grew up in Miami, Florida. Immediately upon graduation from the University of Miami in 1972, he became a photographer for the National Geographic Society, where he remained for twenty years. Three hundred of his photographs were published in National Geographic magazine and hundreds more in numerous books. He was the Director of Magnum Photos, Inc. from 2000 through 2002. In 2013 powerHouse Books published his award-winning monograph Kodachrome Memory: American Pictures 1972-1990. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Brooklyn, New York with his wife–a fine art photographer–and teenage son.
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Prices will increase as the print editions sell.
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