Sponsored by Helen S. and Charles G. Patterson Jr. Charitable Foundation Trust, Sovah Health and What's Your Sign.
American photographer, teacher and author Russell Hart uses his medium to explore the ways in which humans occupy and alter their environments and the landscape, but his photographs aren’t meant to be documentary or even realistic. “My work is based on observation,” Hart explains. “It doesn’t express a world view or share an intimate experience in the manner of so much contemporary art. It’s intended to show familiar things in a new way.”
In recent years, however, Hart’s work has ventured into more personal territory in the form of a project called “As I Found It: My Mother’s House,” newly released as a large-format coffee-table monograph by German art book publisher Kehrer Verlag. The project tells the story of his mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s and dementia, but not with the customary images of the disease’s sufferers and their caregivers; instead, it features photographs he made as he emptied out his mother’s house of forty years when she could no longer live there.
The images in “As I Found It: My Mother’s House” include not only the home’s increasingly empty interiors but also delicate still lifes taken from the massive yet ordered, deeply idiosyncratic collection of sentimental and practical objects and materials his mother left behind. For Hart, making these photographs was a way of mitigating his grief and extracting something positive from the experience. On the one hand the book is a meditation on memory and the pathos of objects. With the context provided by its introduction, texts, and captions, however, it is also a representation of how history and identity are lost to dementia. Signed copies of the book are available in the Piedmont Arts gift shop.
Both bodies of work will be featured among the thirty-five prints of “In a Different Light, ” Hart previously exhibited his environmental photographs at Piedmont Arts in 2017, and his work has been shown at galleries and museums including the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Hudson River Museum, the DeCordova Museum, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which has awarded him three traveling fellowships. He has taught photography at Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He currently teaches in the master’s in digital photography program at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Hart was for many years Executive Editor of American Photo magazine, and received the Griffin Museum’s Susan Sontag Scribe Award for best writing about photography. His writing on photographic subjects has also appeared in The New York Times, Men's Journal, and La Repubblica del Donne, among other publications. Hart grew up in Charlottesville, Va. and now lives in Lexington, Va.
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