New York Photographer Debuts Marilyn Monroe Exhibit in Longview
Mary Ann Lynch Finds Marilyn’s Timeless Appeal Worldwide
Longview, Texas October 6, 2008-- Mary Ann Lynch’s photographic exhibit Marilyn Monroe: More Than You Know freshly illuminates the woman who lived and died in the Hollywood spotlight, and her ever-evolving place in our culture worldwide. Opening at TCC PHOTO | GALLERY on October 7, 2008, the show will run through January 31, 2009. The gallery will host a reception for the artist during the Second Annual Longview Artwalk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue1bM7Rp6u4, on Thursday,October 16, from 5pm to 8pm; in a featured Artwalk http://www.artwalklongview.com event, Lynch at 6:30pm will do a walk & talk of the show. The more than two dozen color photographs include some not previously exhibited as well as a selection from Lynch’s 2005 retrospective, Forever Marilyn: The Enduring Legacy of Marilyn Monroe. A video will be availble on youtube and iTunes in the very near future.
Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jeane Mortensen on June 1, 1926, would have been 82 this year. Though she died in 1962, she is still very much with us – “and as so much more than a sex goddess or Hollywood legend. She’s a permanent, beloved popular culture icon whose meaning is ever-shifting,” says Lynch. Since 1992 the New York-based photographer has crisscrossed the United States and other continents, photographing hundreds of unique scenes, tableaux and people that reveal the world’s continuing fascination with Monroe. In each image, a photograph or representation of Marilyn is shown in its context, from a cluttered NYC antiques shop; to a backstreet bar in Mexico; to the Mojave Desert, where burlesque star Dixie Evans pays yearly tribute to Marilyn. Especially popular pieces are a closeup of Marilyn with a gloved hand to her face--that Lynch made from old newsreel footage; and a dramatic profile of the shimmering form-fitting dress Marilyn wore when she sang “Happy Birthday Mr. President” to John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden in 1962. Film scholar Gene Brown has written of Lynch’s photographs: “As this work reveals, Marilyn is omnipresent, a sort of Everywoman. How and where she appears in our midst says something about how and where we are. And to look at how we look at her is to see and say something about how we tell our own stories.” With many shows and much acclaim to date, Lynch plans to travel Marilyn Monroe: More Than You Know while editing the larger body of photographs for a book that tells the whole story of her global encounters with the timeless Marilyn Monroe.
ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER A photographer/writer for more than thirty-five years, Mary Ann Lynch has exhibited her photographs widely and received awards from the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Chicago Film Festival, the Hawaii Foundation for Culture and the Arts and many other places. Lynch became known as a photographer while living in Hawaii in the 1970s, for her portrait of a native Hawaiian community, Kalapana, A Hawaiian Place. Since then she has continued to do editorial, documentary, and fine art photography (with a foray into filmmaking); to write about popular culture and the arts, and to appear as visiting lecturer and artist/presenter at various places including New York University, Ohio University, the Chicago Film Festival, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, and the 2008 Society for Photographic Education National Conference in Denver. Since 1982 she has divided her time between New York City and her residence in Greenfield Center, New York.
Mary Ann & Marilyn Lynch never met Marilyn in person, though in her pre-teens she was exposed to her unforgettable onscreen magnetism in the movie Niagara at a local Drive-In Theater. She still has her movie magazines and scrapbooks from the 1950s. At Cornell University Lynch studied American Intellectual History, the academic program that was the start of popular culture being taken seriously. After becoming a photographer and seeing Monroe’s image everywhere she went, she felt a new appraisal of Monroe as one the world’s leading popular culture figures was long overdue. Since beginning the work, Marilyn has frequently come to Lynch in her dreams.
Lynch's Marilyn work has been shown in the United States, Germany, Japan and the Czech Republic; and featured in media and publications from New York to Estonia and Spain. Forever Marilyn was awarded honors in the 2005 Lucie/International Photography Awards. The same year XM Satellite and Radio Free Europe did programs with Lynch that went out to millions worldwide. A constant stream of emails and letters from Marilyn aficionados throughout the world reach Lynch every month, with the occasional middle-of-the night call from someone in Europe or Asia.
Selected quotes from press for Mary Ann Lynch’s Marilyn photography and shows
Forever Marilyn: The Enduring Legacy of Marilyn Monroe, 1926-1962. August 2005.
John Stevenson Gallery, NYC.
Celia McGee, New York Daily News Feature Writer: “Lynch has extracted extraordinary images from glimpses of thrift-shop statuettes, old billboards, movie reruns, female impersonators, recent news stories, restaurant signs and endless forms of retro kitsch. She has tracked Marilyn’s shifts from passive pinup to sex goddess to poster-girl for feminism.”
Tim Anderson, editor Camera Arts magazine (quoted in McGee article above): “Mary Ann has to really care about something before she photographs it. She internalizes it and brings it into her heart, as it were, before her head. Most photographers shoot first from the head.”
Marilyn Monroe: Radiant Image, February 2000. E-3 Gallery, NYC.
Robert Hicks, The Villager: “For photographer Mary Ann Lynch, no one epitomizes what popular culture can mean to our self-understanding more strongly than Marilyn Monroe.”
Mila Andre, The New York Daily News. February 2000. “Nearly 38 years after Marilyn Monroe’s death on August 4, 1962, the sexy appeal that surrounded the Hollywood actress lives on in the collective memory of people around the globe. It took photojournalist Mary Ann Lynch to turn that focus into an exhibition.”
The Marilyn Monroe Wall of Fame, June-July 2000. Soho Photo Gallery, NYC. / August 2000. Bellevue Bar, Hell’s Kitchen, NYC.
Mila Andre, New York Daily News (centerfold article): “It’s the ideal setting for Lynch’s “Wall”—and anyone who enters will immediately feel Monroe’s presence.”
Clair Sykes, Photo District News: “Shot in locations from Covington, Kentucky to Quito, Equador, her photos reflect, and perpetuate, the phenomenon of Monroe’s all-pervasive iconic stature, and testify to Lynch’s own passion for the person who so influenced her as a budding young woman.”
Jill Wing, The Saratogian. “Lynch has become Marilyn’s medium of sorts, whose mission is to lift the veil of mystique from her life and allow her photography to tell Marilyn’s story, capturing her as a pop icon and, perhaps, the planet’s most recognized woman.”
Dualities. 1997. Soho Photo Gallery, NYC.
Robert Hicks, The Villager: “Lynch holds a decidedly different understanding of celebrity from the paparazzi and her approach to capturing what lies20beneath the surface of a person tells in her upcoming Soho Photo show “Dualities,” featuring portraits of Marilyn Monroe, the Maharishi, Elvis Presley, Tina Turner, Andy Warhol, Alice Walker, Robert Bly, Keith Haring, and a short-time celebrity, David Allen, a man who lives in a trailer park in Greenfield Center in upstate New York. Lynch likes to photograph celebrities who have touched her life in some way, especially spiritually.”
Jill Wing, The Saratogian: “Her portfolio seems as much a journal of pop icons—living and dead—as a study of photographic interpretations personalized by the photographer’s darkroom manipulation.”
Marilyn Monroe: The Living Icon. 1996-97. Soho Photo NYC
Film critic Scott Siegel: “This is a living, breathing spectacle of Americana captured through the images of Marilyn. Extraordinarily impressive stuff. . .a good idea, executed with elan.”
James Dellaflora, The Villager: “Photographer Mary Ann Lynch is holding a mirror up to society, and we are seeing in the reflection, Marilyn Monroe.”
Film scholar/author Gene Brown: “One often speaks of images ‘capturing,’ but the ones in this exhibit by Mary Ann Lynch belie that act. This is a compelling meditation about the woman who was, and is, loved as no other woman in contemporary culture. As this show reveals, she is omnipresent, a sort of Everywoman. . . .She is an icon but she is also much more than that. These images of Marilyn really depict something of ourselves, individually and collectively. There is an image of Greta Garbo, but there are images of Marilyn Monroe, which make her the screen onto which we project.”
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For Immediate Release: Contact: Tammy Cromer-Campbell
August 7, 2008 tammy@tccphoto.com • 903.236.4686
POWER
Photographs by Tammy Cromer-Campbell
with a selection from
The Gregg County Historical Museum Archive
“As a photographer I feel a responsibility to go beyond mere documentation and presentation to
using my talents and skills to convey messages that need to be heard.”-- Tammy Cromer-Campbell, 2008
Longview, TX, August 7, 2008 – TCC PHOTO | GALLERY is proud to announce the photography exhibition POWER, opening August 12 and on display through September 26, 2008 at the downtown Longview gallery, located at 207 N. Center St. Focusing on both contemporary and historical providers of power in Texas, POWER includes Cromer-Campbell’s images of Texas steam electric stations (some of the largest in the country); the lignite mines that fuel them; Houston's Ship Channel (Texas’s largest clusters of refineries, with low-income housing nestled around them), the Texas Panhandle Wind Farm and select images from the Gregg County Historical Museum's archive.
Cromer-Campbell began her visual investigation culminating to POWER in 2007. Since then, the issues surrounding our country’s need to diversify its power sources in socially and economically acceptable ways
have taken center stage, especially with the Presidential election pending in January 2009. “My wish is that the materials in POWER will encourage viewers to reflect on current sources of power, future possibilities, and
the need for informed choices.” The images in the show are both color and black and white. To capture the scope and awesome quality of her subjects, she worked with a Nikon digital camera. For intimate and dramatic scenes, she chose the low-tech Holga toy camera. To broaden the context of the coverage of Texas power, Cromer-Campbell includes a fascinating selection of 1930s historic oil field photographs from the archives of the Gregg County Historical Museum. Many of the archival images displayed are those Cromer-Campbell made from scans of the originl 8x10 glass plate negatives.
The educational thrust of POWER is a continuation of Cromer-Campbell’s involvement with social issues and the storytelling power of photography. Her first book, Fruit of the Orchard/Environmental Justice in East Texas (2006), was widely acclaimed for its poignantly honest depiction of the human tragedies that befell the citizenry of Winona, Texas, who lived downwind of a toxic-waste injection-well facility built in 1982. At her March 2008 book signing in Denver at the National Society for Photographic Education, she signed alongside acclaimed Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, who recently published his own book of photographs of mines, quarries, oil fields, and more throughout the world. With POWER, Cromer-Campbell adroitly scrutinizes similar subjects in the home state of current President George Bush, a region that can be seen as a microcosm facing what Burtynsky has called “the dilemma of our modern existence. . . a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear.” Texas, and all of the United States, need to become more independent in meeting current and projected power needs. The question is, how? POWER offers a stimulating entrée into this discussion.
The gallery is open Monday – Friday, 11am – 6pm and by appointment. TCC PHOTO | GALLERY is located at 207 N. Center St. and visit the online gallery at http://www.tccphotogallery.com.
ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER: Tammy Cromer-Campbell is an award winning American photographer best known for her work as a social documentary photographer and speaker. Cromer-Campbell received her Associates of Applied Arts degree in commercial photography from Kilgore College, Kilgore, Texas under the direction of O. Rufus Lovett. She continued her education by taking workshops from the masters in photography, such as Arnold Newman, Ruth Bernhard, Michael Kenna, Keith Carter, John Sexton, and others.
In 2006, the University of North Texas Press published her first book, Fruit of the Orchard / Environmental Justice in East Texas. The book received favorable reviews from the Dallas Morning News, Austin American Statesman, PhotoTechniques Magazine, CHOICE, Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, and others. Fruit of the Orchard received an honorable mention for documentary books in the International PX3 Prix De La Photographie Paris. She has received many honors and awards including Blue Earth Alliance’s first ever cash grant, in 1999, for Fruit of the Orchard. Cromer-Campbell’s work has been published in many publications including cover stories for Camera Arts Magazine, Houston Chronicle’s Texas Magazine numerous times, and many others fine publications.
Cromer-Campbell is Vice President Statewide on the Executive Board for the Texas Photographic Society. She served as an Image-maker presenter at the Society for Photographic Educators National Convention, Denver, Colorado in March of 2008. Her first film, Environmental Justice in the USA was included in the Short Films by Texas Filmmakers organized by Southwest Alternate Media Project (SWAMP) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s Brown Auditorium in April 2008. Her work is included in public and private collections internationally such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museet for Fotocunst, Belgium, and others. She photographs from her studio in downtown Longview, Texas and lives with her husband Scott, also a photographer.
