Exhibits


Silver Nitrate: Paris Circa 1984
May
1
to May 27

Silver Nitrate: Paris Circa 1984

Silver Nitrate: Paris Circa 1984
– Donna Cameron –
May 1-25, 2025
opening/vernissage: Saturday, May 3, 2-4:00 pm


Andy Warhol once said "The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.” This is especially true of Paris, where the sense of style and individual idiosyncrasies seem always to be vintage and eternal. Go to Paris tomorrow and you may find the same divas and eccentrics that appear in this show. Here, in black and white, people and place, not landmarks, give meaning.

Images in which human hands reach out, arms embrace, a landmark monument meditatively awaits a cyclist's return: a camera shutter clicks, a film roll is wound forward – ordinary street theater is made timeless. Celluloid negatives are sculptural objects that hold a multi-sprocket hole surface layered with a fragile emulsion. They are to be handled respectfully. One can take a celluloid negative out over time and reconsider it. Reprint it, replay it, and a history ensues, a song.

I shot the silver nitrate photographs in this show in the mid-1980s, long before I made the photographic and filmic images that began to be collected by museums. The enigmatic encounters portrayed in this portfolio began in 1984, when I was a young artist, a stranger in Paris. I return to these celluloid dreams throughout every decade of my artistic practice and find new insights, always finding there is something special about the light in Paris.

View Event →

View All Exhibits