Below is a sampling of photographs by women at the Association of International Photography Art Dealers Show, held at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City.
MONA KUHN
Mona Kuhn's first studies in art were charcoal drawings, and her photographs retain a loose, freehand feel, often forming meditations on light and shadow. Influenced by the frank intimacy of Nan Goldin, she uncovers vulnerability with a tenderness that mutes its dangers.
Her most recent series was photographed in the desert during magic hour, the golden moments around sunrise and sunset. "It is not just the lighting," she says. "I think we feel different during those moments, as if emotions could stand still for a few minutes."
Desert light intrigues her. She studies its motion and its emotional resonance. "People get tired of the heat, you start feeling the weight of light, it becomes heavy," she says. She is drawn to the solitude of the desert, which, she says, "gives you a sense of freedom and loneliness at once."
JESSICA TODD HARPER
Jessica Todd Harper spent her childhood on museum floors, copying John Singer Sargent and Vermeer paintings in crayon, and later watercolors. As an art history major in college, she encountered Memling and Durer, whose paintings seemed to be about almost nothing, the everyday, the commonplace, "but whose charged, quiet, domestic scenes haunted [her] afterwards." She has been compared to Tina Barney and Sally Mann. The work of all three invites us into private worlds whose unguarded moments reveal interior life.
LILLY MCELROY
After growing up "surrounded by cliché representations of [her] own experiences," Lilly McElroy seeks authenticity and the personal. Unafraid to let her work be literal or clumsy, she purposely risks failure so her photographs will feel more natural and resist artifice. This sense of longing bleeds over into the work itself. She says, "I'm interested in talking about how human the desire for connection is."
