Philadelphia Photographer Brian H. Peterson Featured in Exhibition at Ursinus College's Berman Museum

Only Connect: A Conversation About Image and Word, Photographs and Texts by Brian H. Peterson

“Only connect,” says the English writer E. M. Forster in his
novel Howards End. In this unusual exhibition, which runs through March 9 at Ursinus College's Berman Museum of Art, Philadelphia photographer Brian
H. Peterson has selected a smorgasbord of pictures and prose that explores his
spiritual life and the art and practice of photography. He is inspired by
Forster’s insight into the need for connection in our lives.

An opening reception will be held Jan. 30 from 4 to 7 p.m

A critically acclaimed author, Peterson has chosen excerpts
from his two published memoirs, The Smile at the Heart of Things (2009) and The
Blossoming of the World (2011), to create an exhibition that explores the
connections between word and image in his own work. Periodically, Peterson will
be at the Museum to “only connect” with museum visitors.

In addition to being an artist, curator, critic, and arts
administrator in the Philadelphia area for more than three decades, Peterson
has had more than 30 solo exhibitions of his photographs since 1980. His work
is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Amon Carter
Museum, the Library of Congress, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Denver
Art Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Dayton
Art Institute, the State Museum of Pennsylvania, the Danforth Museum of Art,
and the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Peterson discusses his photographs using written statements
that offer a window into the creative process. His Earth Music series
(1993-1997) started with a simple fascination with the “outside” of things,
“particularly how complex, textured surfaces can be rendered with such
exquisite beauty through the precise alchemy of the lens.” The from . . . to
series (1993-1994) began with a playful desire to move in the opposite
direction—to break free from the constraints of the pristine photographic print
and find out if anything would emerge from a more spontaneous way of working,
he writes.

Of the Interior Light series (2003-2004), he says that
“making photographs, for me, has usually involved packing up my stuff and going
places: Montana, Arizona, a local park, or maybe somebody’s home to do a
portrait. It never occurred to me that there were pictures to be found inside
my house as well as outside.” The Fire Music series (2004) began with the idea
of a tiny piece of flickering flame recorded by a camera in front of the
fireplace, first turning the fire into pixels.

Peterson worked as a curator from 1990 to 2013 at the James
A. Michener Art Museum in Bucks County, Pa., and was the editor and principal
author of the 2002 publication Pennsylvania Impressionism (co-published by the
Michener and the University of Pennsylvania Press). His memoir The Smile at the
Heart of Things: Essays and Life Stories (2009) was co-published by the
Michener and Tell Me Press, New Haven, Conn. He was a member of the Museums
Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, and has served on the Visual Arts
Advisory Panel of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He received two Fellowships
for Visual Arts Criticism from the PA Council on the Arts, and his critical
writing has appeared in several newspapers and journals. He has taught
photography at the University of Delaware, the Tyler School of Art, and
Swarthmore College. He received an MFA from the University of Delaware and a BA
in music composition from the University of Pennsylvania.

More information can be found at
www.brianhpetersonwordimage.com.