The Steven Kasher gallery was very simple, but detailed. I liked the clean and basic layout, which put focus on the artwork being displayed. Walking through the exhibit, I noticed the bright white and empty walls. This exhibit had one really large room which was mainly empty. It gave us a lot of space to walk around and browse between each piece of art. The other room was a lot smaller, but the photos were in color, so they stood out more. Frames of different sizes were aligned across with black and white photographs. In the other room, there were colorful photos, like of a beach with lawn chairs, and people playing in the fields. One photo that stood out to me the most was a photo stating, “Sock it to Me Black Power” on a wall in graffiti. This represents a political movement, and from the photo you can see a woman sheltered by wooden boards. Having the photos in the main room to be black and white showed a huge difference between the colorful pictures in the other room. For some photos, there were paragraphs beside them with a short story or quote from someone. My favorite quote from one of them was, “I’ve seen poorer people commuting to Wall Street. Much poorer. But not as hungry”. This quote explains how their environment wasn’t even much of an improvement, but some residents were so poor that they thought they were living in paradise. Another photo shows a barrel with flames coming out, while a little boy is drinking from an old, ragged cup next to it. The environment looks dangerous and dirty, but it’s still home to a lot of these people.
The second room featured Debi Cornwall’s photos of Camp America inside of Guantanamo Bay. The bright photos of water, beaches, and children make it seem like a great place to stay, but the people are also closed in and constantly being watched. Although we did not stay in the exhibit for too long, I still gained a lot of information from both rooms. Both told a story through history and because they were photographs and not paintings, there was a greater sense of reality and truth to the depictions that were being portrayed in the exhibit. Overall, I thought the gallery was really interesting because it was sort of like walking through time. Each picture showed a certain moment in history and browsing through them allowed me to understand what was going on at that point in time. Unlike the other exhibits we went to, there was a different aspect of creativity in these photographs. Taking a picture may seem simple, it’s just point and shoot. However, it’s about capturing the essence of the moment at that time and being able to tell a story that’s already there.
