Woolworth Shopper and Tioga County Courthouse, 1987

BRUCE WRIGHTON: AT HOME  

March 3 - April 30, 2011

Laurence Miller Gallery is pleased to present Bruce Wrighton: At Home, the most comprehensive exhibition to date of Bruce Wrighton's powerful and uniquely American color images taken between 1986 and 1988 in and around Binghamton, New York. Seventy prints, including street portraits, tavern interiors, courtrooms, church confessionals, and cityscapes, will be featured

Using a cumbersome 8 x 10 inch  tripod camera, he would ask the most ordinary of people, from a Woolworth shopper to a security guard, from a carnival worker to an office clerk,  to pose for up to six minutes while he got everything in his viewfinder correct.  Combining a strong sense of formal design with empathy for his subjects, he produced an innovative body of work in the documentary tradition.

Binghamton was formerly a thriving industrial city. IBM was founded there. But by the 1980's it had fallen on hard times. Bruce Wrighton sensitively captured its former dignity that to the casual onlooker would appear as merely worn out and tired. In the basement of the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church, proudly standing under a floating Christ figure, he discovered a 1955 Wurlitzer jukebox.  Despite its age and broken glass, it still glowed its majestic blue and red lights, while offering tunes from the Beatles to Sinatra.

At the local Woolworth store, he photographed customers and sales clerks, including a woman in front of a red wall wearing a pink scarf and white coat with mismatched buttons. Inside the Union Hotel, he photographed once-charming bedrooms, where the rich patterns of the wallpaper, flooring and bedspread are Matisse-like in their juxtaposition. And while visiting the Salvation Army recreation room he photographed its quirky combination of pool cues and balls, orange sofa, portrait of Christ, and a handmade sign declaring NO POOL PLAYING NO TELEVISION SUNDAY.

Bruce Wrighton: At Home celebrates an outstanding but relatively unknown document of a time and place in America that has never completely vanished. Wrighton's unique and potent feel for color is further revealed in a handsome limited-edition monograph with 80 full color reproductions that was recently published in Berlin and is now available in the United States for the first time.

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