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Award-Winning Photographer Displays 35 Years of Work at Opalka
One of Dona Ann McAdams' photographs from "The Garden of Eden," one of the collections featured in "Some Women". It was taken on Coney Island in 1994.
Don’t miss a tour of “Some Women” with Dona Ann McAdams December 4th!
Albany, NY- The Opalka Gallery at the Sage College of Albany is hosting Some Women, a compilation of thirty-five years of photography by Dona Ann McAdams. Some Women will be on display from now until December 11th and McAdams offers a tour of her work on Friday, December 4th at 7pm.
The exhibit holds thirty-five gelatin silver-prints dating from 1974 to 2009. This sheen black and white medium makes the characters pop to life.
“I like the tonal range and the tonal scale of black and white. I like the fact that black and white is a little bit removed from reality,” said McAdams in an interview with Elizabeth Floyd Mair of the Times Union.
It does seem as if the subjects in her work are removed from a moment in time and put on a pedestal to intensify their character. The mediums McAdams chooses play a heavy role in the composition of her work. She shoots all of her photographs in film instead of digital imagery.
“I shot Kodak Tri-X for years, but I switched just recently to Fuji Neopan. It’s a thicker emulsion base, and it works better for me,” said McAdams in her interview with Mair.
In Some Women, McAdams pulls photographs from ten of her portfolios. Her images explore the American West, nuclear industry in America, street protests and demonstrations, performance art, dance, and theater, Barcelona after the Olympics, the Saratoga Race Track, Rome, Appalachian farmers, and the mentally ill and homeless in New York City.
One of McAdams most prominent collections encompassed in the exhibit is The Garden of Eden. This portfolio surveys Coney Island from 1983 to 1998 and examines the mentally ill, particularly schizophrenics, as well as the homeless.
Dona Ann McAdams has won Obie Awards, for work with Off-Broadway theater in New York City and Bessie Awards, also known as the New York Dance and Performance Award. She also received the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in 2002.
Galleries and Museums throughout the country and internationally have shown McAdams’ work. These include the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the International Center for Photography, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Robert Miller Gallery, La Primavera Fotographica in Barcelona, the Print Center, and the Biblotheque Nationale in Paris.
McAdams is currently continuing to photograph workers and horses at the Saratoga Race Track and with the mentally ill of New York City.
“I’m going to photograph a gentleman next week,” said McAdams, “who wants to be part of the project but doesn’t want his face to be seen.” She plans to photograph his face straight on with his hands over it.
For more information please visit the Opalka Gallery’s website, www.sage.edu/opalka, or call Fabienne Waring, the Exhibition Coordinator at (518)292-7742.
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