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Current Exhibitions Future Exhibitions Back to Exhibitions |
Making Pictures: Views, Visions, and the Poetry Within August 31, 2002–February 9, 2003 
In this exhibit, photographs by Judy Bankhead (b. 1951), Keith Carter (b. 1948), Robert Langham (b. 1951), and Skeet McAuley (b. 1951) are brought together from the Museum’s Permanent Collection to explore the relationship between artist and place – i.e., the social and natural environment of this region. These photographers are all Texas artists of the same generation with past ties crisscrossing each other. Two of them, Bankhead and Langham, are from Tyler. These artists capture stunning images of nature and people, and of landscapes and cityscapes.
From Carter’s evocative depiction of the rural life in East Texas to Bankhead’s almost dry documentary of Tyler cityscapes, we see the vast terrain that photography as art form can traverse when expressing the relationship an artist has with his/her place. Carter depicts people in his photographs and his images are objectified, but they are still capable of nullifying the distance in order to take possession of the viewer. Or, perhaps we should say that the artist has the power to identify with his people and his place, which is the source of the almost magical and haunting effect his images have on us. Conversely, Bankhead, who documents Tyler’s urban landscape, disappears – yet only to re-emerge – from her images like the vanishing point in her well-defined compositions (at the counter-point of which we imagine her standing with her camera). The effect is equally haunting, for, whereas in Carter’s photographs we sense the presence of the artist, in Bankhead’s we feel the absence and the loss of place.
This ability of photography as a medium in expressing the range of difference in the relationship between artist and place can also be seen when we compare Langham and McAuley. Whereas Langham’s landscape images express more intimate possession of nature outside Tyler, McAuley’s panoramic vista of Goosenecks State Park seems to be deceptively like a National Geographic spread, a commercialized object of visual consumption. Yet, if a criticism of man’s relationship to nature is immanent in McAuley’s image, so too is it in Langham’s in a different register.
These photographs hide within themselves poetry – the play in meanings of our selves and our place – in the most ordinary and the spectacular. The images are pregnant with meanings that either transcend or delve deeply into what we see around us. By sharing their views and visions, they allow us to appreciate a little better the things, seen and unseen, in our surroundings in Tyler, East Texas, and beyond.
This exhibition is organized by the Tyler Museum of Art.
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