“The Nation Institute and Lannan Foundation proudly present the works of Debbie Fleming Caffery. A closing reception for the artist’s show “Portrait of Neglect: Images of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita” will be held at The Nation Institute on Thursday, May 10th, from 6-8 p.m. Caffery’s presentation will begin at 7 p.m.”
Debbie Fleming Caffery’s black and white images document the painful loss of home and the displacement of memories that are the results of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Of her 2007 retrospective at the Gitterman Gallery, The New Yorker notes:
“Caffery’s brand of engaged, impressionistic humanism is currently so out of fashion it looks almost radical. She photographs farm workers in Louisiana, prostitutes in Mexico, children wherever she finds them, and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina with a kind of tender care that never feels sentimental or familiar. Like Roy DeCarava, she tends to work best in the dark, and many of her subjects in this smartly edited thirty-year survey dissolve into or emerge from shadows and fog. This fuels a rich aura of Southern surrealism in the Clarence John Laughlin mode—the sense that myths are nurtured but also die here.”
Caffery’s photographs are included in the permanent collections of many museums including the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Bibliotheque National in Paris. Her most recent book, Polly (2005, Twin Palms Press), chronicles her long friendship with a solitary and proud African-American woman in the sugar country of Louisiana.
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RSVP Sophie Ragsdale (212) 336-0757 or sophie@nationinstitute
