MELISSA ANN PINNEY
November 12 – December 20, 2009 at Alan Klotz Gallery
Melissa Ann Pinney received a 1999 Guggenheim Fellowship for her photographs of American women and girls. This project became the book, Regarding Emma: Photographs of American Women and Girls, published in 2003 by the Center for American Places in partnership with Columbia College Chicago.
In her foreword to Regarding Emma Pinney states that: "The photographs in this book are based on my experiences growing up. Raised as a Catholic with five brothers and two sisters, I learned early on that girls had to fight for most everything: to get and keep one's share, for credit and recognition, to state one's view of things. When I found the courage to articulate my views, it was by way of wordless photographs that depict precisely what has often been considered insignificant in the domestic, social or cultural sphere. The pictures in this series look ahead to older women, then back to girlhood to see how our dreams and expectations of women are made visible; how feminine identity is constructed, taught and communicated between mothers and daughters."
Of her recent work Pinney has written: "My photographs are grounded in attentive observation of the world. I have come to understand that such mindfulness is rewarded by pictures more authentic and more mysterious than any I might have imagined beforehand ¾or manipulated in PhotoShop afterward. Family life , centered around my eleven year-old daughter, Emma, and my husband, Roger; Emma's friends; and the seldom- portrayed relationship of father and daughter; is my subject. A sense of place is essential to my way of seeing.
It is easy to take the familiar for granted and tempting to look to another place or culture for a fresh and more thrilling view. The challenge of working in depth and over many years with the familiar is to find the emblematic, to see with fresh eyes that which surrounds one day to day. I remain intrigued by ritual, the qualities of light and water and the passage of time."
In addition to the 1999 Guggenheim Fellowship, Pinney received a NEA in 1987 and Illinois Arts Council Grants in 1989 and 1987, among other awards. Pinney's photographs are included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree in 1988 from the University of Illinois at Chicago, following her BA in photography from Columbia College Chicago in 1977.
Melissa Ann Pinney has taught at Columbia College Chicago since 1984. She lives in Evanston, Illinois, with her husband and daughter. Pinney's photographs have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, DoubleTake, the Chicago Tribune, Ms. and U.S. News and World Report.
Lake Michigan, August, 2009
Emma, Reflected, 2009
Washington Park, Chicago (Three Girls in Shower), 2000
