A TAD BIT STRANGE AND SOMEWHAT SURREAL | PRESS RELEASE

L. Parker Stephenson Photographs is pleased to present A Tad Bit Strange and Somewhat Surreal: Photographs from the ‘60s and ‘70s, a group exhibition of unexpected images from an influential movement in photographic history.

Artists on view include Bill Burke, Mark Cohen, Larry Fink, George W. Gardner, William Gedney, Charles Harbutt, Kenneth Josephson, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Leon Levinstein, Nathan Lyons, Bill Owens, and Henry Wessel. Accompanying these artists’ works is a selection of George Krause's fantastic and mysterious photographs from the same period.

While Europe and much of the Far East were rebuilding both their infrastructure and spirit after WWII, the United States was prospering. The booming economy offered many people an opportunity to live the “ideal” life. This was defined socially by a culture of material consumption and physically by the growth of suburbia. Questioning of this “progress” inevitably followed and photographers were well placed, through an increasingly visual culture, to participate in this debate.

An emerging generation of photographers found new ways to comment on the “Social Landscape” (a term first used by Garry Winogrand in 1963, later popularized by Nathan Lyons’ exhibition Towards a Social Landscapein 1966 and solidified by the exhibition at Brandeis University the following year, 12 Photographers of the American Social Landscape). They questioned the world and manifested their views through their work, defining a new era of subjective photography. Some did so by using the medium in a physical manner; with out of focus snapshots, darkroom manipulation or experiments with the photographic paper. Others borrowed from their modernist and avant-garde predecessors, transforming the familiar into the unrecognizable through cropping or dynamic highlights or by using subtle puns or deadpan portraits. The latter is the focus of this exhibition.

The Gallery, located at 764 Madison Avenue (65-66th streets), is open from Wednesday – Saturday 11am-6pm. Please call for hours the week of July 4th. The following week, we will change to summer hours Tuesday – Friday 11am-5pm. For more information or additional visuals by any of the artists please contact the Gallery at (212) 517-8700 or email info@lparkerstephenson.nyc.