Saturday, October 29 - 10:30AM to 11:15PM
Phantom Skies and Shifting Ground responds to the largely unknown late 19th-century photographs of Central America by Eadweard Muybridge. It’s a collection of dark and moody pictures taken during a two-year expedition immediately following Muybridge's involvement in ascandalous murder trial. Guided by Muybridge's sophisticated but problematic combination prints that merge multiple negatives into seamless views, photographer Byron Wolfe and cultural geographer Dr. Scott Brady traced Muybridge's travels through Guatemala and Panama to create photographic and textual analyses of the sites, spaces, and cultures that Muybridge encountered. Through the practice of rephotography -- photographing the same subject from the same perspective -- Wolfe initiates a dialogue with Muybridge over a divide of 130 years. Attempting to reconcile Muybridge's constructed and altered views with his own visual interpretations, Wolfe provides one of the first critiques of rephotography as a practice entangled with ambiguity and impossibility.
Dr. Brady uses Muybridge’s photos as visual benchmarks for Latin American life and landscapes in the 1870s. He views Muybridge’s images as historical records of landscapes and seeks to trace how sites have evolved over the 130 years between Muybridge’s travels and his own.
Constantly questioning the reliability of observation and the stability of the geography, Phantom Skies locates the representation of place -- both then and now -- in invention, and reinvention.
Dialogue and critique are important to the SPE mission.
Please join the conversation.