Brighton Beach & St. Petersburg: Urban Landscapes – Stan Sherer & Abraham Ravett

In the early1980s, during the height of the arrival of Jews from the former Soviet Union, Abraham Ravett used an 8×10 view camera to photograph street and boardwalk scenes in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, New York, a community where many of these immigrants lived. In the tradition of such photographers as Walker Evans and Emmet Gowin, Ravett made contact prints, thus preserving the finest details of the negatives. These intimate prints, depicting scenes outside apartment buildings, under the elevated train line, and views from apartment balconies, present the architectural landscape and the people who inhabit these spaces. Thirty years later, these photographs have become an historical record of a neighborhood in transition and a photographer’s embrace of the landscape that shaped his youth.

Stan Sherer used a digital camera to photograph on the streets of St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2007. Images of chess players, bus passengers, and museum interiors, printed on handmade rice paper, emphasize mood rather than finely captured details. Sherer is interested in bringing printmaking and photography closer together. This group of images highlights the ways that ink and paper interact and is part of an ongoing exploration into widening the range of possibilities for printing digital images.

Read in juxtaposition to Ravett’s series, these photographs could also suggest what the previous generation of Soviet immigrants left behind and what the current Russian landscape has to offer those that still long for a connection to their homeland.

The exhibition will run from Friday, July 4th through Sunday, July 27th, 2014.

There will be a public  reception on Friday, July 11th from 5:30 to 8:30pm.
(Since “First Friday” lands on July 4th this month, Gallery Walk has been postponed to the 2nd Friday of the month)

Click HERE to read about Stan & Abraham’s public lecture at VCP on Self-Publishing photography and art books – Sunday, July 27th at 4:30pm.

Stan Sherer
Stan Sherer is an independent photographer and fine art digital printmaker in Northampton, MA. Sherer was a Fulbright Scholar in Albania in 1994; he served on the Fulbright photography national screening committee from 2003-2006. He has received fellowships and grants from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The exhibition Founding Farms, a profile of Massachusetts’s oldest family farms, toured the country from 1990-1997. Sherer has authored four books of photographs including Founding Farms, and Long Life to Your Children! A Portrait of High Albania. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in printmaking at the University of Massachusetts in 2006. His most recent solo exhibitions are “Vermont Farmsteads” at the Vermont Center for Photography and “Faces of Northampton, Enduring and Forgotten: Main Street, 125 Years” at Historic Northampton. He has taught digital photography at Hampshire College, Mt. Holyoke College, The University of Massachusetts, and The University of Hartford. Visit Stan’s website at www.stansherer.com

Abraham Ravett
Abraham Ravett holds a B.F.A and M.F.A in filmmaking and Photography and has been an independent filmmaker for the past thirty five years. Abraham received grants for his work from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, National Foundation for Jewish Culture: Fund for Documentary Filmmaking, National Endowment for the Arts, The Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities, The Japan Foundation, The Hoso Bunka Foundation, The Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, and a 1994, filmmaking fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His films have been screened internationally including the Museum of Modern Art; Anthology Film Archives; Pacific Film Archives; S.F. Cinematheque;  L.A. Film Forum,Los Angeles, CA.;Scratch Projection, Paris;  Image Forum, Tokyo,Japan;  FAMU, Prague,Czech Republic;  WRO  Art Center, Wroclaw, Poland, among others. His work has won ?Top Prize? at the Viennale 2000 , Ann  Arbor Film Festival, and Onion City Film/Video Festival.  In 1999, he collaborated with dancer/choreographer, Bill T. Jones, on his solo performance, “The Breathing Show.” In 2009 a retrospective of his films was screened at WRO, Wroclaw , Poland. In 2012 and 2013, Ravett self published two books of photography and produced two music CD’s. His most recent film, “Notes for a Polish Jew,”  premiered at the 2012 Vienna International Film Festival. Mr. Ravett teaches filmmaking and photography at Hampshire College, Amherst, MA.Visit Abraham’s web site at: http://faculty.hampshire.edu/aravett/pages/home.html