Jan Staller

Thursday, January 20, 7pm
Free to CCNY members, SVA students, faculty, and staff
$5 general admission, $3 for other students with ID

Q & A to follow the discussion

Jan Staller, considered an influential pioneer of night photography in color, moved to New York City in 1976, where he began to photograph along the abandoned West Side Highway. His uncanny pictures made at twilight, making use of artificial light, have been exhibited extensively, including solo shows at Julie Saul Gallery in ’90, ’94, and ’99, and group shows at the Whitney Museum and New Museum. These images were compiled in his first book, Frontier New York (Hudson Hills Press 1988).
He continued to photograph in and around New York City until the mid-1980s when he began to concentrate his efforts in New Jersey. In 1985, he purchased a Land Rover and outfitted it with an engine-mounted generator and two stadium lights and drove the car into areas of the New Jersey landscape that lay between the highways and rail lines. It was there that he made many of his signature mixed light photographs that appeared in his monograph, On Planet Earth, Travels in an Unfamiliar Land (Aperture 1997).
Staller has also done extended projects, made during daylight hours, in France, Spain, Denmark, Finland and Russia in the early 80’s, and Thailand in ’96 and Japan ’96, 2000, and 2004. He has also photographed on road trips through the northwest U.S. in 2001, and from NYC to Marfa, Texas, and throughout Japan in ’04. Regardless of the light he works with, his landscape photos tend to evoke the sense of a strange and unfamiliar world. Over the last decade, he has had solo shows at Alan Klotz Gallery and the Griffin Museum of Photography, 2003, Tokyo’s MinMin Gallery, 2004, Amherst College, 2005, and participated in group shows at the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego (2008) and the Hecksher Museum (2010). He continues to photograph areas locally accessible in a day’s drive, creating formal abstractions from industrial and construction details. He is currently seeking a publisher for his third book, provisionally titled Assembly, which will include his most recent work.