黑料不打烊

Keith de Lellis Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition of over forty photographs created during the 19th and 20th centuries that historically altered and redefined the capabilities of the medium by utilizing pre-digital innovations such as photo montage, photo collage, double exposures and the darkroom process of composite printing. This show elegantly brings together photographs motivated by both advertising and artistic intents to highlight the significant level of ingenuity applied by artists across the fields to deliberately visualize their subject matter, of which many on display are painstakingly constructed by hand. An example of such artistry is found in a star-studded montage published by L. J. Lipp Publishing of Hollywood, California in 1928 with hundreds of faces of Hollywood鈥檚 famous actors and actresses, including Charlie Chaplin and Tom Mix, Hollywood鈥檚 first Western star. In another photograph we witness a beaming Fred Astaire miraculously dancing through the clouds as he plays the role of Charlie Hill from the 1952 film The Belle of New York.

Trick photography lends itself to a surreal atmosphere as it is can take elements of reality and assemble them together in an altered, dream-like narrative. Rolf Tietgens (German-American, 1911-1984) made a series of these kinds of images of American mystery novelist Patricia Highsmith, including one on view in which we see a nude Highsmith approaching an illustration of a mysteriously cloaked doorway. Highsmith herself reflected on how photography is able to manipulate reality to question reality, redefining the possibilities not only of photography but how we perceive reality itself, as she inquired in her diary, 鈥渨here does reality end and photography begin?鈥� (Diaries and Notebooks, 1941-1995).