The Road Less Traveled

The Gallery of Fine Art opens its first solo

show with Newtown photographer
David Graham.
In Newtown, Pa.
By: Amy Brummer

Photographer David Graham made repeated visits to document the home of Arthur and Nan Kellam, a couple who lived off the coast of Maine on the remote Placentia Island. Above: a birch-bark note at the cabin, "Back Soon/Placentia Island 2002."

The lead glass windows of the Bond Building in Newtown, Pa., refract the afternoon light into the open airy showroom. Completed in 1921, the building served as a car dealership, exhibiting automobiles on the ground floor and housing a garage on the second.
   Located on State Street, the Art Deco building has served several purposes since the Bond brothers sold their dealership in 1945, and it has recently become an exhibition space again.
   On June 28, the Gallery of Fine Art opened its doors with a show of artists from its permanent roster. Included in that selection are woodwork from William Hoehne, paintings by Robert Beck, Anne Cooper Dobbins, Mavis Smith, Katharine Steele Renninger, Harry Orlyk, Thomas Chesar, Pat Martin and Gordon Haas, pastels by Bob Richie, pottery by Don Jordan and photography by David Graham.
   The gallery will present rotating exhibits highlighting individual artists. Mr. Graham, a Newtown resident, will be the first artist featured in these solo shows. His work has been the subject of several books including Land of the Free (Aperture, 1999), Road Scholar (Hyperion, 1993) and Ay, Cuba (St. Martin’s, 1991). Mr. Graham is an associate professor in the media arts department at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and works regularly for The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Time, Fortune and Forbes.
   The show at the Gallery of Fine Art, Home and Away — Photographs of Maine, runs Sept. 5 to Oct. 12 and includes 24 images from his most recent publication, Alone Together (Pond Press, 2002). It will be the first showing of these works in Bucks County. The Kathleen Ewing Gallery in Washington, D.C., The Print Center in Philadelphia, and the Ricco/Maresca Gallery in Manhattan have all shown his work in solo exhibitions over the past two years, and his photographs are in collections of museums nationwide.
   The photographs document the domicile of Arthur and Nan Kellam, a couple who lived off the coast of Maine on the remote Placentia Island from 1949 to until Mr. Kellam’s death in 1989. The island is currently owned by The Nature Conservancy.
   Mr. Graham learned of the island from a friend while visiting the area in the ’90s. He returned over the course of several years to photograph the remnants of the couple’s simple life. These works will be shown alongside selections from Mr. Graham’s book, Taking Liberties (Pond Press, 2001), a collection of color photographs gleaned from his travels around the country. Where this work is arresting with its use of bold colors and hot light, the photographs of Placentia Island have a subdued palette that runs from honeyed browns to warm greens.
   A curled piece of birch bark mirrors an old note tacked to a bulletin board, a study of shapes and textures. The lonely rowboat overturned in the tall grass is a pale gray slice against a range of dark and light green. Delicate teacups hang silently against the kitchen wall. A stripped mattress is laid out on the bed awaiting sleepers who will never return.
   "The other odd thing about shooting the house was, you know, the way I sort of accepted the color palette," Mr. Graham says. "I also accepted the subject matter because it is not my normal subject matter. I just sort of went in there at once and said I’m going to shoot this house, this cabin."

"Inside the Bandstand/Placentia Island 2002."

   He did, however, take notice of the fact that each thing in the house had been brought there deliberately, at some trouble, which makes the items that much more curious and personal. While the pictures from the Taking Liberties book have the feel of well-crafted snapshots, there is a distance to them that gives them a calculated feeling. The photographs of the Maine cabin, shot with a medium-format camera, have a different sensibility, partially because Mr. Graham was consistently returning to the site, but also because the nature of the work demanded it.
   "There are two ways to work," he says. "One is you kind of bring fresh eyes to something, and the other is you bring familiar eyes to something. I’ve always worked both ways. Ever since I started doing national pictures all over the country, I always maintained another group of work that I did in this house in Tyler State Park. I just sort of photographed around my wife’s gardens, and around the house in black and white, whenever I had the time or I saw something kind of interesting I would just shoot it. I did that for years and years and it was working totally differently, but I do it both ways."
   The two bodies of work share an essence that is not necessarily obvious at first glance. As a photographer of vernacular artwork and architecture as well as the eccentricities of American life, Mr. Graham has transformed the Kellam’s cabin into a piece of sculpture, paying attention to the deliberate choices the couple made in fashioning their material existence.
   "If you look back at almost everything I’ve shot," Mr. Graham says, "it almost all has to do with how a person is expressing themselves, whether it is building their house in the shape of a coffee pot or putting a huge elephant in Margate or something like that. It is to get somebody’s attention or to communicate an idea with somebody."
   This philosophy resonates with the gallery’s stable of permanent artists. All of the members in the group are contemporary artists with a distinct personal voice. They all hail from Bucks and Hunterdon counties, with the exception of Mr. Orlyk, who is from New York State. Styles range from the cool, collage portraits of Ms. Smith, to the charged, abstract portraiture of Ms. Dobbins. Mr. Beck’s scenes and landscapes are loose and lyrical, those of Mr. Chesar are textured and ethereal. Mr. Jordan’s earthy clay vessels are free-form towers, while Mr. Hoehne’s furniture combines clean lines with fine graining.
   A basement gallery will showcase selections from the permanent roster. There will always be rotating pieces on view, and visitors can use the on-site computer to peruse the Web site, which has at least a dozen works by each artist.
   The Gallery of Fine Art is located at 201 S. State St., Newtown, Pa. Home and Away — Photographs of Maine will be on view Sept. 5-Oct. 12. David Graham will be present for a reception Sept. 6, 5-8 p.m., and a gallery talk and book signing Sept. 14. Hours: Wed.-Thurs. 11 a.m.-6 p.m., Fri.-Sat. 11 a.m.-9 p.m., Sun. noon-5 p.m. and by appointment. For information, call (215) 579-0050. On the web: www.gfanewtown.com