Verde Art Gallery Presents: SHATTERED LIVES - PORTRAITS IN AMERICA

Verde Art Gallery Announces New Exhibit

Show Opens on April 3^rd with a reception for the artist 3-5PM

Exhibition runs through May 4^th, 2011.

For more information please call:  Joanna Tully 609 454 3182 or

Tasha O’Neill, 609 865 5456

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Shattered Lives – Portraits in America

Photographer James Pryor

Solo Show

Verde Art Gallery’s Next Exhibit

Kingston, NJ, March 14^th, 2011/Verde Art Gallery / Long before digital photography made countless subjects ubiquitous, the down and out were particularly ready and inviting ones for emerging artists.  Dorothea Lange artfully and sympathetically brought them to public attention in the 1930’s.   In ‘Migrant Mother’ Lange approached her subject without asking questions.  The woman, she said, “seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me.  There was a sort of equality about it.”

As Lange triggered a fresh appreciation of the individual’s plight, so too does James Pryor in his haunting and evocative portrait series, Shattered Lives – Portraits in America.  Pryor also tackles this subject without asking questions.  He has made portraits that are outstanding in terms of the emotion they evoke and the technical skill that they embody. 

Leveraging a powerful technique, he fashions an eye-to-eye connection that is extraordinary, and possibly unique.  His combination of perfect capture and inspired processing allows us to experience these broken lives just as Mr. Pryor found them.  “I chose to accentuate their emotional and physical distortions through radical selective focus and applied aggressive grain structure,” says Pryor.  That technical “how-to” might be of interest only to fellow photographers; what matters for everyone is that it allows Pryor to protect the integrity of his subjects while exposing them in a way that is both intensely insightful, and in sync with how he sees them.

The portraits are direct with the gaze of the sitter meeting the eyes of the viewer.  There is electricity in the connection.  A virtual transfer of data: the hard times the subjects have had conveyed with a “this is the way it is” conviction.

How do we make sense of this?  How do we know how to feel?  We can step back from an initial emotional reaction like pity, because the subjects do not inspire such feelings.  This allows us to come to our own conclusions. 

In all of the photographs the portraits reveal a quiet intelligence that is set-off by weary and wear-rugged faces.  Mr. Pryor incorporates the hymn, “Amazing Grace” as a backdrop for these photographs.  He gently suggests, through this vehicle that if we take notice as a society, it is truly possible for those who are lost, to be found, and therefore saved

James Pryor is the recent recipient of B&W Magazine’s Portfolio Spotlight Award, and the B&W Magazine Merit Award for a Single Image.   Pryor has exhibited his work widely in the greater Princeton area: Numina Gallery, SohoPhoto Gallery, Dalet Gallery, & Riverrun Gallery.

Verde Art Gallery

(Inside the Verde Artists’ Collective)

4492 Route 27

Kingston, NJ  08528

(next to Eno Terra Restaurant & alongside the D&R Canal)

Shattered Lives – Portraits in America

James Pryor, Photographer, Solo Show

Opens April 3 with a reception between 3-5PM

Gallery Hours:  Wed-Sat 11-5PM, Sun. 12-4PM

Gallery.verde@ gmail.com

Facebook:  Art Verde