September 23 2016 – December 2016
Recent works from
Wendy Babcox | Jason Lazarus | Noelle Mason
In his seminal book Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes examines a photograph of condemned assassin Lewis Payne by the photographer Alexander Gardner. The photograph shows Payne in his cell awaiting execution. For Barthes this illustrates the essential paradox of photography that, a photograph is always a picture of the past in the present, Payne is both “dead and going to die.”
The title of the exhibition, There is a light that never goes out, is taken from a song of the same name by the band The Smiths, and describes a moment so perfect that the author is content to die. For the exhibition at The Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, There is a light… references the ability of photography to create an image through light and effectively extend the past into the future.
Wendy Babcox, Jason Lazarus, and Noelle Mason are members of faculty at the University of South Florida’s School of Art and Art History. As colleagues, friends, and collaborators in this exhibition, they explore their mutual interest in the performative act of making a photograph and its subsequent potential in the world.
Featured works consider the material properties of photography as it continually reimagines itself in technological terms, and also examine photography’s unique and persistent capacity to collapse time and space, recording traces of our lives. For the artists in this exhibition, a light that never goes out is the opportunity to infuse living histories into the chaos of our contemporary moment–death need not interrupt profundity.
