FIELD TRIP: Exhibition Tour / Meet & Greet: Vaune Trachtman

* NEW DATE * 
Sunday, February 23, 2025, 3pm

LOCATION: Von Auersperg Gallery, Deerfield Academy, Deerfield, MA (more info here) (campus map)

FREE & Open to the public!

Please, join us for this informal artist talk by photographer Vaune Trachtman, who’s images are showing at the Von Auersperg Gallery until February 28, 2025

“For the last couple of years, I’ve been working on a new series called ALL THAT IS, which feels like the next chapter of NOW IS ALWAYS. I’m pleased to announce that both series will be featured in my largest exhibition to date, at the von Auersperg Gallery at Deerfield Academy.

ALL THAT IS began in the 1950s when my parents were first dating. Decades later, I found their notes and love letters, which I combined with archival family photos and my own images to create this series of photogravures. Their written marks remind me of the tension you feel when you recognize language but struggle to comprehend it. Memory can work the same way—try as we may to reach into the past, we can never grasp it. This is a feeling I think we all share when recalling a first love, a first loss, the first sense of ourselves aging, and the first awareness that, ultimately, we are the marks we leave behind.

About the Artist

Vaune Trachtman is a photographer and printmaker whose work honors the methods and tones of historic processes, but without the toxic chemicals. Formerly a master printer of silver gelatin prints and asphaltum-based photogravures, she began to feel that her immune-system was being compromised by those processes. She now makes gravures with little more than light and water. Her images explore the evanescence of dreams and memory— a “fleeting, wondrous, sacred habitation” (Collier Brown, Od Review).

Vaune was born in Philadelphia and attended the Tyler School of Art and Marlboro College. She received her M.A. from New York University and The International Center for Photography. She worked in the imaging department of TIME Inc. for many years. She lives in Brattleboro, Vermont.