Keith de Lellis Gallery is pleased to announce two one-person photography exhibitions opening on September 20 and running through November 14, 2002: “INVISIBLE BEINGS”, spirit photographs by Georgiana Houghton and “SHADOWS”, abstract photographs by Marvin E. Newman. The images made by these artists, nearly a century apart, have in common the photographers’ obsessions with the human figure as both a physical and spiritual symbol.

“Invisible Beings”: An Exhibition by Georgiana Houghton
September 20 – November 14, 2002

In the 1870’s, Georgiana Houghton, a London medium, produced a curious series of photographs of spiritual phenomena. She was one of a legion of dedicated spiritual disciples who used photography to prove the existence of a visibly evident spirit world. Houghton used her pictures (the pictures were actually a collaboration with photographer, Fredrick Hudson, Holloway Road, London) to illustrate a world peopled with dead relatives and other ghostly beings. Miss Houghton created the photographs for her 1881 book, “Chronicles of Spirit Photography.” The book’s detailed-text, along with the accompanying spirit photographs, was the evidence presented by Houghton to substantiate the authenticity of her gifts as a medium.

The images on exhibit are 1870’s sepia tone albumen process photographs made by Houghton with the original notations recording the séance and various apparitions present. Houghton’s carefully crafted genre scenes depict the romanticized obsession with death and the afterlife in 19th-century Victorian England.

Houghton’s pictures demonstrate the conflict between the artful and the notion of truth inherent in photography, an art form heralded as “the truthful art” from its very beginning.

“Shadows”: An Exhibition by Marvin E. Newman
September 20 – November 14, 2002

In 1951 Marvin E. Newman produced a marvelous series of photographs of the shadows of pedestrians strolling the pavements of downtown Chicago. Newman’s camera captured the mercurial shadows, with every nuance of their fleeting presence a study in gesture and posture. These striking images were printed to maximum contrast and are displayed reverse-side up making the shadows come alive. The range of images includes such subjects as the postman, boy leaning on sign, woman gossiping, as well as lyrical figural patterns.

Newman’s experiments with shadow pictures were first presented in this artist’s master thesis at the Institute of Design in Chicago. His photographs blend the cool graphics of a Bauhaus photograph with street photography, a perfect amalgam for a student of what is now referred to as the New Bauhaus. In 1953 Museum of Modern Art curator, Edward Steichen, selected Newman’s Shadow photographs for a 1953 MOMA exhibition of promising young photographic talent entitled: “Always the Young Stranger.” Newman’s Shadows are currently on view in two important Museum exhibitions: “Visions from America”, through September 22, 2002 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and “Taken by Design, Photographs From The Institute of Design, 1933-1971”, through October 20, 2002 at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.