(Above: Kid Reaching Through Bars, a photograph from one of photographer Susie Morrill’s visits to Cuba.)
Edited by Randi Bjornstad
The PhotoZone Gallery opens a new group show of work by its members on March 14. The exhibit also features work by two among the group, photographers Susie Morrill and Glen Newland.
Both Morrill and Newland focus on providing visual social commentary in the places they visit and photograph. Morrill began spending time in Cuba in 2011, exploring the disparity in the daily lives of the well-off and the poorer working classes as they make their livings under the longtime Castro Communist regime.
“The American embargo seriously impacts the Cuban people,” Morrill says in her artist’s statement. “Despite their lack of resources, the Cuban people remain a proud, hardworking, and happy people. To know Cuba is to love it.”
Newland calls his show Invisible: Economic Refugees, and he examines the way people portray themselves as they interact with society around them.
“Sometimes the people I photograph have been marginalized by the people around them and/or the culture and the society of which they are an integral part,” he writes in his statement. “Ideally, my images respect the dignity of the subject while revealing some truth.”
The display will be on the walls at The Midtown, a new high-rise building at 1600 Pearl St. in Eugene that combines residential units with headquarters for a variety of area arts groups, among them Eugene Ballet, the Lane Arts Council, and the Eugene Concert Choir.
This show can be seen in two ways — in person at The Midtown from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily, or online around the clock at photozonegallery.com from March 14 through April 30.
There will be an opening reception on on Saturday, April 2, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.
The PhotoZone Gallery encourages the pursuit of fine art photography, welcoming processes ranging from film to digital to computer-generated and subject matter from portrait and landscape to documentary and experimental.
San Francisco Black Friday Underground, a photo in Glen Newland’s Invisible: Economic Refugees project.
