Amy Blakemore: Photographs 1988-2008

Houston-based Amy Blakemore takes photographs in order to explore the ways in which memory both records and transforms visual information. Employing the camera as subjective tool, Blakemore (born 1958) has compared the activity of photography to the process of gathering broken bits and lost objects discovered serendipitously during long walks. "Instead of picking up stuff," she states, "I leave with a flat, squared-off record of things and people in space." Amy Blakemore: Photographs 1988-2008 surveys Blakemore´s mature career with a carefully distilled selection of 36 works, ranging from early black-and-white street photographs to her lushly colored portraits and landscapes. Originally trained in documentary traditions, in the mid-1980s Blakemore embraced the highly idiosyncratic Diana camera, black-and-white film, and the informal format and compositions of snapshot photographs. At the same time, however, she brought to her practice a rigorous sense of composition and masterful printing techniques, drawing a nuanced range of tones and an exceptional degree of resolution from her negatives. In the mid-1990s, she made the transition to color work through a series of highly abstract landscapes, incorporating elements of the land, sea, and sky. By the end of the decade, a series of family portraits and views of her native Tulsa introduced a new element of intimacy into her work. Blakemore´s most recent photographs concentrate again on the figure-whether randomly captured or formally posed.