It often takes the eyes of an outsider to help us see who we are.

Allen Spore, who made the eighty photographic portraits of Carson City/Carson Valley residents in this exhibition, was a stranger to the neighborhood when he arrived in Fall 2003 as the first artist-in-residence of the Capital City Arts Initiative (CCAI). He is no stranger to community portraiture, though, having completed similar projects in the Northern California suburb where he lives, and in the small town in eastern Colorado where he grew up.

Spore was warmly welcomed by his hosts and immediately “embedded” into Carson City’s cultural life. In makeshift studios at Comma Café in downtown Carson City, and at J.T.’s Basque restaurant in Gardnerville, he photographed over 120 residents. The results are what you see on these walls. You may recognize your neighbors in these images, or people you’ve passed on the street or in the supermarket, or even yourself.

Apart from the shock of recognition, what is it about these photographs that make them remarkable, memorable, and significant as documents and as art?

Consider first the process of their making. In this project Spore, like a number of other contemporary photographers, updates the tradition of urban street photography practiced by earlier 20th Century artists such as Robert Frank, Helen Levitt, Diane Arbus, and Garry Winogrand. Today, many artists are increasingly leaving the studio to go out in public and engage people who are unknown to them. In their art-making activities they consciously consider what it means to confront a “stranger”: from how to negotiate taking a picture to addressing a range of ideas about community, anonymity, social and cultural diversity and dislocation, and city life. [1]

Each of the images in this exhibition is the product of a personal negotiation between the artist and the individual[s] he photographed. They are true collaborations, commemorating acts of mutual trust, generosity, and openness to experience -- acts made even more courageous in light of the climate of fear and suspicion which pervades so much of the world today. The people in these photographs deliberately chose to be part of something positive, meaningful, and larger than themselves. Collectively their images may reveal a longing to create community, more than a confidence that community already exists.
 

 
1 Much of this paragraph was taken almost verbatim from the "Curatorial Statement" by curators Edward Earle, Christopher Phillips, Carol Squiers, and Brian Wallis in the exhibition brochure for Strangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video, September 13 - November 30, 2003: New York, NY, International Center of Photography, 2003.

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