Throckmorton Fine Art is pleased to offer an exhibit by the accomplished photographer, Elisabeth Sunday. Thirty of her portraits of Africans - male and female - will be shown, all of which are black-and-white, large format, platinum prints. Sunday uses mirrors to elongate figures, producing a compelling visual alchemy. The resulting portraits, while elegant, entice a “hard look,” to see what is being shown and, inevitably, to speculate on what is masked. The most familiar - and beautiful - form, that of the human body, is shown in different ways. Sunday’s photographs are utterly original. Her work is groundbreaking.

Sunday is passionate, hard-working, and methodical: she has spent years on projects, and traveled to some of the most inaccessible corners of Africa, from the Sahara Desert of Mali to the forests of the Congo Basin, from the gold coast of Ghana to the valleys of Ethiopia.

Sunday’s photography has been widely exhibited in Europe and in the United States at an impressive range of institutions, ranging from the Münchner Stadtmuseum (in Munich), to the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. An equally impressive set of institutions hold Sunday’s work in their collections, from the Bibliothèque nationale de France to the Eastman Kodak Collection. An over-sized book recently has been published of her work; it is titled Grace. The Throckmorton exhibit will be the first New York showing of Sunday’s platinum prints.

For 26 years, Elisabeth Sunday, has found her muse in Africa: a place of origins, devastating beauty, great troubles and unyielding expressions of life. She's traveled alone and lived among various original peoples who amidst a changing world, have clung tenaciously to traditional ways of life. From the hunter-gatherers dwelling in the primeval forests of the Congo Basin, to the nomadic tribes inhabiting the vast stretches of the Sahara Desert, Sunday's photographs reveal an interplay of invisible forces that connect her subjects with the world of nature. Utilizing a flexible mirror of her own design, Sunday photographs reflections that blend and dissolve the boundaries between her figures and their environment. Sunday's images express an intimacy with a corresponding strength derived from that relationship. She writes: "Mirror photography is much more than photographing a reflection, it produces a visual alchemy that combines the physical world with that of the great mystery….and captures some element that remains hidden in straight photography."

“Mirror photography is much more than photographing a reflection, it produces a visual alchemy that combines the physical world with that of the great mystery. Photographing with mirrors allows me to see the world in a different light and capture some element that remains hidden in straight photography. The use of elongation in indigenous and western art has long been an archetype for the unconscious. Following in this tradition, I use my mirror to shine into the internal deep spaces where we universally connect to something greater.”

Throckmorton Fine Art
145 East 57th Street 3rd floor
New York (NY) 10022 United States
Tel. +1 (212) 223 1059
info@throckmorton-nyc.com
www.throckmorton-nyc.com

Opening hours
Tuesday - Saturday
From 11am until 5pm