Today is Day Two of Atlanta Celebrates Photography Week. I am highlighting the annual group exhibition, Ones to Watch, that is curated by Atlanta-based independent curator Mary Stanley. Every ACP, Stanley selects a group of Atlanta locals and national artists that represent up-and-coming photographers that are bringing a fresh voice and perspective to the contemporary photographic landscape. This year is no different, focusing on the personal and narrative as we continue to emerge from the pandemic.
Stand out work by Jasmine Clarke populates the right corner of the space. Four luminous prints with an internal glow and a deep sense of intimacy. There is something magical about her sense of composing narrative that is diaristic but doesn’t forget to feel universal. The images are rooted in the everyday, a curtain, a bed, a window, filtered through her keen, almost surreal eye.
In the center of the exhibition, Kristen Joy Emack’s portraits arrive somewhere between family photographs and mythic painting in their compositions and thin gold frames, elevating the love between family and the representation of young black girls.
I got a chance to speak with newcomer Pierre Solomon about his abstract portraits during the opening. Inspired by the fragmentation of Francis Bacon paintings, his work fragments and overlays portraits of his loved ones to comment on the complex nature of relationships and the different dimensions of the self. The photographs become about the relationship–and distance–between photographer and subject.