CALLING FOR ENTRIES: A Juried Photography Exhibition – Secrets and Mysteries
Juror: Catherine Edelman. Exhibit to Open July 5th.

If your audience is standing indefinitely motionless, entranced by the possibilities in your work and in devising an infinitude of scenarios and alternate endings, then you’ve made an image whose suggestive ambiguity inspires the kind of daydreaming of champions we’re after.

Photographers have created images that baffle the viewer as early at the 1860s. Henry Peach Robinson being a pioneer of the photo montage long before there was photoshop. However you create images that lead the imagination to the the edge, leaving us needing only to leap, we want to see them. Multi exposures, constructions, staged, anything goes, as long as it leaves your audience guessing.

Juror: Catherine Edelman
Opening in Chicago in 1987, the Catherine Edelman Gallery was quick to become one of the Midwest’s leading fine art photography galleries. Director and Owner Catherine Edelman has “a patient eye for artists, tracking their progress [and] representing mature photographers who deliver consistent, quality work, regardless of age or exposure.” Edelman has upheld her original promise to feature prominent Contemporary photographers alongside new and emerging talent, supplying her audience with a refreshing breadth of both subject matter and photographic technique.

CEG debuted with Nan Goldin and the “Ballad of Sexual Dependency” progressing through everything from street photography (Susan Meiselas, Sebastiao Salgado, James Nachtwey) to fashion photography (Annie Leibovitz, Herb Ritts, Matthew Rolston) to traditional landscape images (Michael Kenna, Lynn Geesaman) and also socially-conscious work (Richard Misrach, Jeffrey Wolin, Terry Evans, Allen Ginsberg) and narrative (Joel-Peter Witkin, Elizabeth Ernst, Dan Estabrook).

Working closely with magazine editors and book publishers, the Catherine Edelman Gallery co-published several monographs and collections, including: Written in Memory: Portraits of the Holocaust, photographs by Jeffrey Wolin (Chronicle Books), Pressure, photographs by Joe Ziolkowski (Pohlmann Press), What Were You Thinking (celebrating the 15 year anniversary of the gallery in association with Paper Mirror Press) and Iron Beauties, a monograph on the work of Chicago photographer Michelle Keim, published by Nazraeli Press.

Catherine Edelman is an executive board member of the Association of International Photography Art Dealers and President of the Chicago Art Dealers Association. In addition to hosting Saturday Morning educational seminars for her community, Edelman recently opened an online gallery of underrepresented local artists, titled “The Chicago Project.”

We are so pleased to offer the seasoned curatorial eye of Catherine Edelman for “Secrets and Mysteries.”