Positive About Negatives

Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will host “Gallery Talk: The Artist’s View” on Friday, November 22, from 6 to 8 PM. In conversation will be photographers Tria Giovan, Thomas Hoepker, and Ralph Gibson, discussing their featured work in Artists Choose Artists, a triennial exhibition highlighting the East End arts community with a multi-generational focus.

The youngest of the three, Giovan was born in Chicago in 1961 but raised in St. Thomas. Her images have landed in magazines across various genres, ESPN Sports, Travel & Leisure, Coastal Living, and more. Fine art photography of hers can be seen at the Museum of Modern Art, New York Public Library, and the Jewish Museum, to name a few. She splits her time working between Manhattan and Sag Harbor.

Giovan said she’ll talk about the foundation of her body of work; she spent about six years working in Cuba in the 1990s. She had her photographs published in a book in 1996, and then she revisited the photographs, scanning the polar negatives in high resolution. She whittled the photos down from a collection of 1000 to about 125, which was published in 2017.

“I found that in doing the archiving in the preservation of these negative scans, it opened up another whole world . . . To be able to, for example, zoom in on a big scan on their computer screen and see what’s actually there is exciting and it actually is a translation of the negative to the scan to the printing in a whole new way. It’s just another layer of creative process,” Giovan said.

Based out of NYC and Southampton, born in Germany in 1936, Hoepker studied archeology and art history before working as a photographer and photojournalist. His publicized works in Muenchner Illustrierte, Kristall, and Stern gifted Hoepker with traveling the world. In 1989, he became a member of Magnum Photos and served as president from 2003 to 2006. In between, in 2005, the Goto Museum in Munich displayed 230 of his selected photographs showcasing his travels throughout Germany and across Europe.

Gibson, born in L.A. in 1939, is currently the Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France and is most recognized for his photographic books, including images with a sexualized or mysterious undertone. His work has been seen across 170 worldwide museum collections and has been incorporated into film and live performances at New York’s Roulette. His awards are expansive, including a Guild Hall Academy of the Arts Lifetime Artist Achievement Award in 2015.

Parrish Art Museum is located at 279 Montauk Highway. Tickets are $12, free for members, students, and children. For more information, visit www.parrishart.org.

nicole@indyeastend.com