Henry Horenstein: Histories: Tales from the 70s | MONOVISIONS

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ClampArt is happy to present “Henry Horenstein | Histories: Tales from the 70s,” a selection of rare vintage prints. The exhibition coincides with the release of the artist’s monograph of the same title from Honky Tonk Editions (Hardcover, 144 pages, 115 illus., 10.25 x 9.75 inches), which includes a foreword by Tom Rankin, director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

When Henry Horenstein attended college at the Rhode Island School of Design in the late 1960s, his professor Harry Callahan instructed him: “Shoot what you love.” To that end, Horenstein turned his lens toward a wide range of subjects in his immediate environment, aware that the broad political and social changes of the era would inevitably alter all that was familiar. With his camera, the artist documented a personal history that achieved resonance with anyone who experienced 1970s America—“big cars, plaid pants, long hair, and all.”

Carefully chosen from the artist’s personal collection, the photographs in the exhibition showcase some of Horenstein’s favorite images from the 1970s—a number of which have never before been publicly seen. In the forward to the monograph, Tom Rankin writes that Horenstein “kept his rambling eyes. . .on what seem the small and mundane elements of life. . . He intentionally avoided the front of the stage, the typical perspective of an audience member, and seemed not to care so much about photographing the finish line of the great race.” He continues: “Henry Horenstein rambled all over the 1970s—from home to the speedway, from honky tonks to the horse tracks, and much in between—chasing pictures down the backstretch of a decade, finding the lasting voices and enduring lives that help sing us back home, help us to see where we once were, and what it means to us today.”

Henry Horenstein is the author of more than thirty books to date. His work is represented in the collections of a long list of public institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Art, Princeton University, New Jersey; the High Museum, Atlanta; the Fogg Museum of Art, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. He is a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, and resides in Boston.

Henry Horenstein
Histories: Tales from the 70s
April 9 – May 21, 2016

ClampArt
531 W 25th St New York, NY 10001
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