January 12, 2022, 6:30-8:30pm
Featuring Vaughn Sills with David Weinberg and Peter Nohrnberg
Click HERE to view a recording of this event.
The first still lifes can be traced back to ancient Egyptian funerary paintings discovered in burial sites, and continued in popularity during the Middle Ages when the style was used for religious purposes. During the Northern Renaissance artists grew increasingly interested in creating realistic studies of everyday items and in the 19th century still life featured prominently in the experiments of photography inventors Jacques-Louis-Mandé Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot. They did this in part, for practical reasons: the exceptionally long exposure times of their processes precluded the use of living models. Photographers of today continue exploring the genre with in its many forms.
Vaughn Sills, our featured presenter in PRC Nights: Still Life, continues the long tradition with her romantic floral arrangements perched in front of landscape imagery. Her photographs have been shown at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Gibbes Museum in Charleston SC, the DuSables Museum of African American History in Chicago. Vaughn is represented by the Kingston Gallery and Ellen Miller Gallery; and her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, DeCordova Museum, Harvard Art Museum, Simmons University, and the Fidelity and Eaton Vance Collections.
David Weinberg received his B.A. from Temple University in 1971, and M.D. and Ph.D. degrees in 1977 from New York University School of Medicine. Following his residency and research fellowship, Dr. Weinberg served as a staff pathologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Associate Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School. Upon retiring from a thirty-year career in academic medicine David pursued a second career, completing a certificate program in professional photography at Boston University in 2006. He has exhibited his fine art photography in galleries in New York City and Boston, and has participated in many national juried shows. David is currently the President of the Danforth Art Alliance, and is a member of the board of directors of the Framingham University Foundation, serving on the Danforth Museum Advisory Board, the Danforth Museum Collections Committee, and the FSU Foundation Finance Committee. He is a resident of Brookline, Massachusetts.
A poet, literary scholar and cultural critic with a keen interest in visual culture, Peter Nohrnberg has been taking, developing, and printing photographs since his early teens. Over the years his work has been displayed in a diverse set of venues, including the Albemarle County Fair, Oxford’s Magdalen College, the Worcester Arts Center, and the Visura.co web platform. In the past he has shared both a portfolio of landscape photography and one of family portraits with members of the Boston Photographic Resource Center. His experiments in creating photographic still lives derives from his fascination with the historical connections between photography and painting as well as the more phenomenological aspects of photography as an art of both presence and absence.