591 Exhibition: Abby Robinson - Autoworks



I have become a big fan of Abby Robinson - her work is imaginative and unpretentious in a way that appeals a lot to me ( she probably knows more about photography than most of us). I love her humour and perspective. Please enjoy this selection from the "Autoworks" series. - Mr Urbano


AUTOWORKS is a series that already covers a 35-year+ period and is an ongoing project. Begun when I was a graduate student, this body of work will continue until I'm too old and feeble to hit the shutter. Though the series certainly has diaristic elements, what I'm doing is exploring the interactions between photographer ←→ camera ←→ photographer. The photographer (in front and in back of the lens concurrently) gets to be director, actor, observer, subject and/or prop, and the camera functions as companion and accomplice.



The pictures (small, intimate and ID-like 2” x 3” prints in 3” x 4” laminates) are never displayed chronologically since I don’t think the point of the work is exclusively or traditionally documentary. Instead, by combining pictures throughout the years, the images parallel memory itself--quirky, circular, paradoxical, ironic, sly, and funny.  The effect is to honor both time and truth as well as to deconstruct them. The series is lucid without being linear; the sequencing swirls through time without loosing its storytelling thread.

Abby Robinson teaches photography at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in Manhattan in the B.F.A. Photography and the Graphic Design & Advertising Departments and head up SVA’s Digital Photography Residency in Shanghai.



Comments

br said…
wonderful!!!
P-O Stoltz said…
Fascinating journey through a persons life. Some pictures are fantastic in their own right while others leave me quite blank. But the sum of them all ae almost breathtaking. Thank you for letting us se them.