August 20, 2014

Photography: Before & After exhibition opens at Lewis Center for the Arts
Exploration of the photographic medium in a changing digital era

Photo caption: Bottlerocket by Adam Ekberg

Photo credit: Photo by Adam Ekberg
What: Photography: Before & After, an exhibition exploring the photographic medium in a
changing digital era
Who: Work by Princeton-connected artists: alumni Lily Healey and Carlos Jimnez Cahua, postdoctoral fellow Sara Sadri, faculty member Deana Lawson, Hodder Fellow Miko Veldkamp, and
Princeton resident Adam Ekberg, organized by the Lewis Center for the Arts Program in Visual
Arts.
When: September 17 through October 4; opening reception September 17 from 5:30 to 7:00
p.m.
Where: Lucas Gallery at 185 Nassau St., Princeton
Free and open to the public
(Princeton, NJ) An exhibition of work by six photographers will explore the nature of
photography by focusing on the mediums changing issues in a digital age. Photography:
Before & After, presented by the Lewis Center for the Arts Program in Visual Arts at Princeton
University, runs September 17 through October 4 at the Lucas Gallery at 185 Nassau Street. An
opening reception will be held on September 17 from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. The exhibition and
reception are free and open to the public.
The photographic process has changed dramatically in recent decades, raising significant issues
for artists who work in this medium, notes Joe Scanlan, Director of the Program in Visual Arts.
Photography: Before & After will particularly look at the time that goes into setting up a
photograph before the click of the shutter and the effort that goes into managing the image

afterward. The exhibition presents six different case studies of how artists, all with ties to
Princeton, negotiate these issues in their work: Princeton alumni Lily Healey and Carlos Jimnez
Cahua, post-doctoral fellow Sara Sadri, faculty member Deana Lawson, Hodder Fellow Miko
Veldkamp, and Princeton resident Adam Ekberg.
Since its inception, photography has been a means of recording people and events through the
controlled exposure of light-sensitive materials. In the mid-nineteenth century it was done on
sheets of metal and glass for posterity, as in the Civil War images of Matthew Brady. At the turn
of the last century, the camera was used to capture phenomena not visible to the naked eye, as in
the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge. For most of the twentieth century, photography was
refined into the art of the decisive moment, explains Scanlan, using the phrase made famous
by Henri Cartier-Bresson and the many artists and journalists who came after him.
Judging by the work of many photographers today, digital technologies and methods have largely
turned the decisive moment inside out. Digital photography affords artists the ability to see an
image as soon as they have taken it and the ability to take hundreds at one time. The ubiquity
of digital photographs has diluted the notion of the artfully captured, rarified image, contends
Scanlan. At the same time, the ability of everyone to take pictures in every corner of the world
has politicized the act of taking a picture at all. Even then, an artists memory card might only be
the starting point for what they really want to see, something they cannot know until all their
files are uploaded and ready to be tweaked in Photoshop. Many artists explicitly question, at this
point in history, what actual, printed photographs are for, says Scanlan.
Carlos Jimnez Cahua graduated in 2008 from Princeton with a degree in chemistry and a
certificate from the Program in Visual Arts. His recent photographs are singular, sculptural
experiments in photographic cause and effect, with often-humorous consequences. Untitled #93
(2013), involved Cahua parking his car on four carefully placed sheets of photo paper and
leaving them exposed to the elements for a week. Untitled #104 (2013) is a digital print of a
rocky landscape that is assaulted by an adjacent carpet steamer for the duration of the exhibition.
Adam Ekberg is an artist and graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who recently
moved to the Princeton area. Ekbergs photographs require the elaborate pre-arrangement of
site-specific events that he matter-of-factly captures on camera. A drop in the bucket (2013)

depicts the impact of an object in a distant bucket of water with no evidence of rigging or
previous misses in sight. His ironically titled Bottlerocket (2007) shows only the smoke trail of
the object in question that the photographer has just missed.
Lily Healey is a 2013 Princeton graduate of the Department of Art and Archeology who
concentrated in studio art. Healey is mesmerized with the virtual life and mutation of digital
image files, elusive things that inhabit our devices and get moved around without ever being
touched. This otherworldly air is evident in a series of photographs Healey made of trees on
campus that she altered in Photoshop. The trees exist as recognizable subjects that have been
eerily removed from reality.
Deana Lawson is a full-time lecturer at Princeton and a recent Guggenheim Fellow whose new
work entails photographing cities in the American South and the African continent that were
previously involved in the slave trade, aided by research funding from the Lewis Center. For
Lawson, photographs begin with specific people in specific places but do not become art until
after a rigorous editing process. Lawson has agreed to share how she thinks through her
images as her contribution to the show, including several new, large-format prints.
Sara Sadri was a post-doctoral fellow in the School of Engineering and Applied Science last
year, where one of her research photographs won top prize in the Schools Art of Science
competition cosponsored by the Lewis Center. Trained as a hydro-engineer, the subject of
Sadris images can take moments or centuries to form the patterns that she captures through her
lens. Like Cahua, Sadri is a trained scientist who has chosen the path of full-time artist and
moved to Hollywood, where she hopes to make a career as a scientific documentary filmmaker.
Miko Veldkamp is a painter currently living in Amsterdam and a 2014-15 Hodder Fellow, the
first studio artist to win this distinguished award. Veldkamp is consumed with digital culture and
his paintings are a direct response to its speed and pervasiveness. Veldkamp questions what
painting can do in the face of such relentless image production, which he answers by proceeding
as if painting can compete with photography as a means to commemorate special moments, as in
City Hall (2013), or the everyday, as in Trailer (2012).

To learn more about this exhibition, the Program in Visual Arts, and the Lewis Center for the
Arts visit arts.princeton.edu.
###
The Lewis Center for the Arts encompasses Princeton Universitys academic programs in creative writing, dance,
theater, and visual arts, as well as the interdisciplinary Princeton Atelier. The Center represents a major initiative
of the University to fully embrace the arts as an essential part of the educational experience for all who study and
teach at Princeton. Over 100 diverse public performances, exhibitions, readings, and lectures are offered each year,
most of them free or at a nominal admission fee. For more information about the Lewis Center for the Arts,
including a complete list of supporters, please visit arts.princeton.edu.