Revisions: Celebrating Fifty Years of the UMBC Photography Collections features highlights and lesser-known gems from UMBC’s considerable photography holdings. Looking back at a half-century of collecting, the exhibition offers thematic groupings and visual juxtapositions of photographs from the nineteenth century to the present. The display asks viewers to approach the history of photography with fresh eyes. Among the artists featured are Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Kerry Coppin, Cary Beth Cryor, Judy Dater, Robert Frank, Roland Freeman, Ralph Gibson, Lewis Hine, and Alfred Stieglitz.
Alfred Stieglitz, Sun Rays – Paula, Berlin, 1889/ printed 1929. Gelatin silver print. Gift of Edward Bafford, The Photography Collections, UMBC (P74-07-001)
In 2016, Anastasia Samoylova (American, b. Soviet Union, b. 1984) moved to Miami, Florida. As she familiarized herself with the city through photography, a larger story began to unfold. The resulting body of work, FloodZone, explores what it looks like to live in the southern United States at a time when rising sea levels and hurricanes threaten the most prized locations with storm surges and coastal erosion.
Samoylova’s lyrical photographs are deceptive, drawing us in with a seemingly documentary promise of a palm-treed paradise. Their alluring color palette—filled with lush greens, azure blues, and pastel pinks—gives way to minute details that reveal decaying infrastructure, encroaching flora, and displaced fauna.
Both seductive and eerie, Samoylova’s images show us what it is to live at the edge of a climate crisis, a space where palm trees topple over onto buildings, where the patina of constant moisture results in dank mold on a freeway overpass, where the sky fills with golden hues after the storm. Somewhere between the artifice and the sobering reality lies the melancholy of living with the constant burden of climate anxiety.
The presentation of this exhibition is supported by an arts program grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the State of Maryland and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support comes from the Libby Kuhn Endowment Fund, as well as individual contributors.
We wish to thank HistoryMiami Museum, the Chrysler Museum of Art, and the George Eastman Museum for their support of the production of prints and texts for this exhibition.
Anastasia Samoylova and Mark Alice Durant, professor of visual arts at UMBC and publisher of Saint Lucy Books, will discuss Samoylova’s FloodZone and the art of the photobook.
Climate Change, Science Communication, and the Arts:An Earth Day Panel Discussion featuring Anastasia Samoylova
Monday, April 22, 5 pm, Library Gallery
Reception to follow; free and open to the public
How do climate scientists share their research and data with the wider public in a way that non-specialists can understand? How might art contribute to this urgent work? This panel discussion will feature artist Anastasia Samoylova in conversation with scientists and media historians specializing in science communication.
The panel is moderated by Sarah L. Hansen (M.S. ’15), STEM Communications Manager at UMBC, and features panelists Lavar Thomas of the Environmental Protection Agency, Tracy Tinga, Assistant Professor in the Media & Communication Studies Department, and Autumn Powell, graduate student in Geography and Environmental Systems.
Anastasia Samoylova (b. 1984) is a Russian-born American artist who moves between observational photography and studio practice. Her work explores notions of environmentalism, consumerism and the picturesque. Recent exhibition venues include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, C/O Berlin, Fundación MAPFRE, George Eastman Museum, Chrysler Museum of Art, The Photographers’ Gallery, London, and Kunst Haus Wien. In 2022 Samoylova was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. Her work is in the collections of the Perez Art Museum, Miami; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. Published monographs include FloodZone 2019, Floridas 2022, and Image Cities 2023.
Amos Badertscher, Frank Grundhal, 1975. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the artist.
August 30–December 15, 2023
Lost Boys: Amos Badertscher’s Baltimore is the first career retrospective of artist Amos Badertscher (American, 1936–2023) in the United States. Between the 1960s and 2005, Badertscher documented hustlers, club kids, go-go dancers, drag queens, drug addicts, friends, and lovers who were part of LGBTQ+ life in Baltimore. A self-taught photographer, Badertscher worked on the fringes of the polite society into which he was born as an upper-middle class white Baltimorean. “Breaking all the rules of documentary photography,” as he has stated, he developed a signature style of spare portraits staged in his home studio.
Taking his camera into the city’s clubs and gay bars, Badertscher recorded the shifting geographies and personalities of queer Baltimore pre-Stonewall and through the height of the AIDS epidemic. In the early 2000s, he captured the urban decay, economic devastation, and rampant drug use of sex workers in the city’s post-industrial landscape, in a body of work foregrounding aspects of Baltimore’s queer history that have rarely been acknowledged. Badertscher returns repeatedly to his personal photographic archive, inscribing his prints with handwritten notes on his subjects’ personal histories, filtered through his own recollections. This exhibition explores the power dynamics and desires embedded in his photographs, which memorialize people often marginalized by society.
Header image: Amos Badertscher, Voice Wafers in Time #1, 1975. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy Amos Badertscher Estate.
Public Programming
LGBTQ+ Oral Histories: Ethics and Practice
Panel Discussion
September 28, 2023, 5pm
Reception to follow
Featuring Dr. Kate Drabinski (UMBC), Dr. Joseph Plaster (Johns Hopkins University), Hunter O’Hanian (Independent scholar and curator), and students of the 2023 Interdisciplinary CoLab, “LGBTQ+ Oral History Project.” This event is Co-sponsored by the Department of Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies, UMBC.
Image: Amos Badertscher, Portrait of a Hustler, 1978. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy Amos Badertscher Estate.
Selected works
Left to right, top to bottom: A 70’s Fairy Tale, 1979; A Little More Keith Haring, Less Jasper, ca. 2001; Dennis and the Ladder, 2001; A Letter from Jail, 1979; One of the Stories Billy Had to Tell Me #1, 2001; West$Side Billy #1, 2001; Voice Wafers in Time #1, 1975; Stoney, 1982. All images courtesy Amos Badertscher Estate.
Distant Early Warning, a multi-year project (2015-2018) by Canadian/American photojournalist Louie Palu, provides a look at the evolving militarization in the North American Arctic driven by invented narratives and imagined threats. Now, decades after the end of the Cold War, debates have emerged over more efficient shipping routes, opportunities for resource extraction and the future of the Arctic related to climate change. Along with the six other Arctic nations (Finland, Greenland (Denmark), Iceland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden), the United States and Canada are maneuvering to assert and defend their claims over the territory. Consequently, some Indigenous communities in the region are slowly coming face to face with increased geo-political activity and tourism. This exhibition examines operations of power and bears witness to a culture of fear and hyper-preparedness as we brace for an unknown future.
Palu’s work was supported by funding from the John Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Geographic Magazine, and Pulitzer Center. The presentation of this exhibition is supported by a project grant from the Baltimore County Commission on the Arts & Sciences and an arts program grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the State of Maryland and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support comes from the Libby Kuhn Endowment Fund, as well as individual contributions.
Public Programming
Participatory Installation & Panel Discussion: Geopolitics and Geology in the Arctic
Once considered nearly impenetrable, the Arctic is losing roughly 21,000 square miles of ice each year and warming faster than any other place on the planet. As climate change melts its icy armor, the region is taking on strategic importance. This panel discussion explores contemporary geopolitics and geology in the Arctic from a variety of artistic, scholarly, and scientific perspectives. Topics include: new scientific methods for measuring and analyzing the influence of sea ice thickness on the climate, the future of national competition and claims over the Arctic, and impact of climate change on the indigenous communities in the region.
Join us before the panel discussion for a participatory installation of photographs from Distant Early Warning encased in blocks of ice in the plaza outside the Albin O. Kuhn Library and in a hands-on display in the Library Gallery.
Panelists:
Louie Palu (bio below)
Dr. NathanKurtz is the Chief of NASA’s Cryospheric Sciences Laboratory, Deputy Project Scientist for NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite mission, and UMBC alum (PhD Atmospheric Physics, 2009). His research involves remote sensing of the polar regions with an emphasis on the use laser and radar altimetry data to study the impact of sea ice on the climate. He has traveled to both the Arctic and Antarctic numerous times as part of ship-based and airborne field campaigns.
Dr. Brian Grodsky is a Professor of Comparative Politics and Chair of the Political Science Department at UMBC. His research interests include various aspects of democratization and human rights, as well as the politics of disaster response and climate change. His books include, The Costs of Justice (University of Notre Dame Press 2010); Social Movements and the New State: The Fate of Pro-Democracy Organizations When Democracy is Won (Stanford University Press 2012); and The Democratization Disconnect (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).
Louie Palu is a photographer and filmmaker whose work has examined social political issues, such as human rights and conflict for over 30-years. He is a 2016 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and was awarded the 2019 Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions In Portraiture. His work has examined topics such as the war in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, drug war in Mexico and changing geopolitics of the Arctic. His last four publications deal with how narratives can be reshaped by changing the sequence of images including in his deconstructed book Front Towards Enemy (2017, Yoffy Press). His work has appeared in National Geographic Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, BBC, The Guardian, Der Spiegel and El Pais. His work is held in numerous collections including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and National Gallery of Art. His films have been broadcast internationally and screened at numerous festivals including the Munich and Barcelona Documentary Film Festivals.
Peggy Fox’s career as a photographer spans assignment-based work and her own fine art practice. For clients, she produced picture stories aimed at conveying a narrative within a single image. Meanwhile, her photographs recording street life in Baltimore, documenting the vanishing towns of Maryland’s Patapsco Valley, and chronicling her extensive travels across the globe provided opportunities to tell stories shaped by personal encounters and characterized by a strong sense of place. Fox’s experiments in collage expand the existing imagery of those photographs. Combined with transparencies, layered upon aluminum ground, and embellished with hand-worked details or digital manipulation, the resulting images engage the surrealist tendencies of collage to render reality into fantasy and to juxtapose subjects in new, unexpected ways. Certain motifs recur across the body of work, including enshrouded, falling, or diving figures; architectural features of arches, portals, and stairways; and references to religious iconography, mythology, and physics. This virtual presentation is structured around three groupings, intended as three possible unfolding paths that emphasize the inherent narrativity of the artist’s constructions. These sets of collages are not prescriptive, but are rather evocative of emotions, impressions, and symbols. Viewed as “morality tales,” the images conjure stories but remain ambiguous, their lessons open to multiple interpretations.
* The images below will scroll automatically. They can also be advanced using the arrows at right and left. To pause the slideshow and to view titles, hold the cursor over the image.
The work begins with my black and white photographs. It grows out of a desire to personalize and elaborate on these initial images by joining them, collaging them, and painting on them to enlarge the story. The particular quality of the photographs is integral to, and is the dominant feature of, the images.
As an independent contract photographer I was part of a genre of “what makes a one shot, picture story?” There were parameters, there was an approach. There were stories to be told, in schools and hospitals. It was very traditional storytelling taken to the highest level. This work, while honoring that, is storytelling of a different nature.
Peggy Fox studied painting at Moore College of Art in Philadelphia. After relocating to Baltimore and serving as director of the art department at St. Paul’s School, she embarked on a career as an independent photographer, balancing her time between assignment photography and fine art.
Early in her career, Fox was featured in a one-person show at the Baltimore Museum of Art. From 1987 to 1996 she developed Lost in the Cosmos, a 10-by-200-foot mural executed in porcelain enamel on steel and commissioned by the Maryland Transit Administration for the Johns Hopkins Hospital Metro station.
In 2009 her book with writer Alison Kahn, Patapsco: Life along Maryland’s Historic River Valley, was published by The Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago. She also had a solo show at The Atlantic Gallery in New York City in 2012. She has received two Maryland Arts Council grants and her work has been exhibited nationally.
For the past twenty years American artist Shannon Taggart (born 1975) has documented Spiritualist practices and communities in the United States, England, and Europe. The resulting body of work, Séance, examines the relationship of Spiritualism to human celebrity, its connections to art, science, and technology, and its intrinsic bond with the medium of photography. This exhibition presents forty-seven haunting images from the series, revealing the emotional, psychological, and physical dimensions of Spiritualism in the 21st century.
Spiritualism is a religion born in nineteenth-century America whose adherents believe in communication with spirits, often transmitted through the figure of a medium who receives psychic messages from the dead. Not coincidentally, photography was invented at the same historical moment, when the new technology was revered for its ability to faithfully record reality. Photography thus became a preferred medium of scientific documentation capable of rendering invisible phenomena visible, such as in astronomical photography, X-Rays, and microscopy. For Spiritualists, photography was a tool for revealing the existence of spirits, but for non-believers the ghostly forms that materialized in spirit photographs proved nothing more than darkroom trickery. While this double-sided coin of belief and skepticism haunts the histories of both photography and Spiritualism, Taggart’s photographs do not take sides. The images that comprise Séance are characterized by open-mindedness and empathy toward their subjects, many of whom are brought to Spiritualism through grief and a desire to reconnect with lost loved ones.
The photographs on display explore the communities and phenomena associated with Spiritualism, including séance circles, mediumship, and the objects and technological devices used to aid communication with spirits. Among the most arresting images are those that chart the artist’s quest to capture ectoplasm, a supernatural substance that is paradoxically both spiritual and material. Often made in darkened rooms, the photographs are characterized by otherworldly blurs, chance flares and orbs, and entrancing portraits cast in glowing colors. Taking on the role of participant observer, Taggart bears witness with her camera to an unseen world of belief lying just beyond the fringes of everyday reality.
Public Program
Artist’s Talk: Shannon Taggart
Thursday October 14, 2021
5:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Shannon Taggart is an artist and author based in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA. Her photographs have been exhibited and featured internationally, including within the publications TIME, New York Times Magazine, Discover, and Newsweek. Her work has been recognized by Nikon, Magnum Photos and the Inge Morath Foundation, American Photography and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace. Taggart’s monograph, SÉANCE (Fulgur Press, 2019) was listed as one of TIME magazine’s ‘Best Photobooks of 2019.’
This exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Pensacola Museum of Art.
The exhibition is curated by Beth Saunders, Curator and Head of Special Collections at UMBC, and Anna Wall, Chief Curator of the Pensacola Museum of Art.
The presentation of this exhibition at UMBC is supported by an arts program grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the State of Maryland and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support comes from the Libby Kuhn Endowment Fund, as well as individual contributions.
Shae McCoy, From the series, West Baltimore Ruins, 2018-2020.
As described by the artist, West Baltimore Ruins is “a visual story told by West Baltimore’s daughter.” McCoy created the series between 2018 and 2020 as a means of documenting the architectural landscape of the neighborhood in which she was raised, where an estimated one third of buildings are now abandoned. In addition to her digital camera, McCoy also used a cell phone camera to record her impressions, noting that its mobility and discretion enables photographs to be made easily while on the move. The resulting images take the viewer on a walk through the neighborhoods of West Baltimore as viewed through McCoy’s observant eyes, capturing the vibrant colors of empty row house facades, the charm of the area’s neglected historical architecture, unruly vegetation reclaiming empty houses, and signs of encroaching gentrification.
As physical remains of the past, ruins are typically associated with disuse and decay. McCoy’s photographs point toward the causes behind this deterioration in West Baltimore: housing discrimination, urban blight, voucher programs that have relocated residents rather than reinvigorated neighborhoods, and lack of investment in commercial renewal that has benefitted other parts of the city. By turning attention—and her camera—to this landscape, McCoy also enlivens it. Her connections to the area and interviews with residents that helped shape the project invest the photographs with a personal perspective, preserving the memories and histories embedded in the vanishing architectural structures of West Baltimore.
This virtual presentation displays a selection of images and interviews from the project. Photographs from the series have been presented both in black and white and color on the artist’s Instagram and the entire series is published in McCoy’s 2021 book West Baltimore Ruins.
Public Program
Virtual Artist’s Talk: Shae McCoy in Conversation with Dr. Ashley Minner (UMBC) 12:00 noon March 11, 2021
West Baltimore has aggressively opened my eyes to the irresponsibility and disservice of city officials done to urban black communities. Ironically, these communities once thrived with culture and now they decay as new developments await.
Shae McCoy, West Baltimore Ruins (2021)
This project is an in-your-face first account of what Baltimore residents in these mentioned communities experience everyday. It is an artistic call-out for city officials to see the cause of their neglect.
Shae McCoy, West Baltimore Ruins (2021)
In 2018, then mayor of Baltimore Catherine Pugh targeted corner stores in West Baltimore as sites of drug dealing and crime that did little to benefit the community. However, corner stores and convenience stores often provide basic necessities to residents in areas defined as food deserts and where commercial service establishments are otherwise lacking. McCoy notes that the first sign of gentrification in her neighborhood was the closure of the corner stores.
In the 1950s and 60s, Sandtown was known as “Baltimore’s Harlem” where musicians like Diana Ross and Billie Holiday performed and where jazz legend Cab Calloway was born. After riots in 1968, the population began to decline and now one third of buildings in the neighborhood stand vacant. The neighborhood was locus for the 2015 Baltimore Uprising in response to the arrest and death of Freddie Gray while in police custody. Residents of the area report feeling harassed by police presence.
I am no stranger to vacant houses. As a matter of fact, I still live next door to one in my current neighborhood of Park Heights. Many of the vacant houses in my old neighborhood of Sandtown served as playgrounds and meeting places for my friends and I as children.
West Baltimore Resident Otis Eldridge in Shae McCoy, West Baltimore Ruins (2021)
*Click images in galleries above to enlarge
Shae McCoy is a photographer based in Baltimore, Maryland. Her work has been featured in major publications such as Teen Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Essence, Baltimore Magazine, and BMore Art and displayed on the Baltimore Museum of Art website and in the Joan Hisaoka Gallery in Washington DC. Shae is founder of the cultural blog Uncommonrealist.com and has interviewed actors, activists, community leaders, and politicians to creating a spotlight for local artists. Uncommonrealist was nominated for The Inaugural Southern Blogger Impact Awards in 2016 and featured on local platforms such as Docs Castle Media, and Undaground Radar Magazine. In 2018, the blog won an award for Best Entertainment Website.
Interviews
McCoy interviewed current and former residents of West Baltimore during the making of this project. Their words and recollections appear in her book, creating a dialogue between her images and the community that calls these neighborhoods home.
Unique Mical Robinson, 31, Woodland Park Apartments.
Score Swayze, 29, 1411 Division Street.
About the book
Filmed by Shae McCoy. Edited by David Sebastiao. Music by Zadia.
West Baltimore Ruins is available to purchase here.
UMBC Magazine features ERRANDS, the first in a series of online exhibits offered by the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery this spring. The artist, Zachary Z. Handler, will give a virtual artist’s talk for the public at noon on February 18. Read the article.
Virtual Artist’s Talk: Zachary Z. Handler 12:00 noon February 18, 2021
