Summertime will feature a selection of gelatin silver prints from the artist’s upcoming, revised, and expanded book of the same title to be published later this year by Nazraeli Press. Taken between 1984 and 1991, the images in Summertime capture the light, emotion, and possibility of an endless summer day. In addition, images from the artist’s Summer Camp series will be featured in an accompanying online show.
In this lyrical work, Mark Steinmetz (American, b. 1961) features children and teenagers in the midst of everyday activity within urban, rural, and suburban landscapes. They are subtle yet powerful pictures that capture both a strong sense of displacement and isolation felt by many young Americans as well as a shared joy, tenderness, and ineffable beauty. In his introduction to Steinmetz’s celebrated book South East, Peter Galassi writes, “ Mark Steinmetz works in a venerable tradition of photographic prowling that bets everything on the ordinary. Each picture is the fruit of an unplanned encounter: Though the photographer may know more or less where he is going, he can’t know precisely what he will find. An accumulation of these improvised perceptions can make both a world and a way of looking at it”.
Steinmetz’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and others. He has taught photography at Harvard University, Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College, Emory University, and The University of Hartford MFA Program. Steinmetz is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994 and has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe.
Monographs by the artist include: Rivers and Towns (2022), Berlin Pictures (2021), South Trilogy (2021), Summer Camp (2019), Carnival (2019), Past K-Ville (2018), Angel City West Volume 3 (2019), Angel City West Volume 2 (2017), Angel City West (2016), Fifteen Miles to K-Ville (2015), The Players (2015), Paris in My Time (2013), Summertime (2012), The Ancient Tigers of My Neighborhood (2010), Greater Atlanta (2009), South East (2008), South Central (2007), among others. His work has also been published in Aperture, Blind Spot and Double Take magazines.
Mark Steinmetz
Summertime
26 June – 29 July, 2023
Joseph Bellows Gallery
7661 Girard Avenue
La Jolla, CA 92037
Tel (858) 456-5620
josephbellows.com
East Hartford, CT 1988 © Mark Steinmetz: Summertime
Lincoln, IL 1988 © Mark Steinmetz: Summertime
Hampton Beach, NH 1986 © Mark Steinmetz: Summertime
Middletown, CT 1986 © Mark Steinmetz: Summertime
Chicago, IL 1990 © Mark Steinmetz: Summertime
Higganum, MA 1986 © Mark Steinmetz: Summertime
Shelton, CT 1985 © Mark Steinmetz: Summertime
