Interior Exposure

Jessica Todd Harper began in 2000 with large format colour photo portraits of family and friends, following a project begun when she was still at high school and began losing her grandmother to Alzheimer’s disease. Observing her grandmother’s increasingly brief periods of lucidity, her increasingly weak awareness of the domestic environment, of people dear to her and everyday objects, Harper carried out a work of deep reflection on the functioning of memory and the meaning of the private sphere in the individual. This gave rise to the shots that portray chiefly the female members of her family, images of herself, relations present and past, the latter immortalised in period photos and old paintings. Evincing an extraordinary affinity with natural light, and exploiting long exposure times in carefully arranged domestic settings, Harper’s images hark back to 16th and 17th century European painting (the Dutch still life painters, the portraitists of the North European Renaissance) and at the same time to the contemporary photography of Andrew Wyeth, Sally Mann and Arnold Newman. The fifty plus photos in the book – the first monograph on the artist – are presented with a foreword by Larry Fink.

Jessica Todd Harper’s work has been exhibited with museums and galleries across the USA, including: The George Eastman House’s International Museum of Photography and Film (traveling: 2007-2009); The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2006-2007); The Museum of Fine Art, Ball State University, Muncie, IN (2007- 2008); and the Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, OR (2002). She will have a solo show with her New York gallery, Cohen Amador, in April 2008.