“The first question everybody asks is: ‘Are you going to have a darkroom?'” remarks Brian Wallis, executive director of the Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW). The center is moving into a four-story former cigar factory in midtown Kingston on January 18. The new headquarters, designed by Lopergolo + Bartling Architects, will include 6,000 square feet of exhibition space, a theater, an expanded digital media lab, workshop rooms, offices, a photo library.
And yes, there will be a darkroom. Even in this highly computerized age, some artists lovingly develop their photographs by hand. In fact, the more archaic methods of photography are growing in popularity: tintypes, cyanotypes, ambrotypes, even daguerreotypes.
Why is the Center for Photography at Woodstock now in Kingston? A good question. It moved in 2021, and is considering changing its name (which was originally the Catskill Center for Photography). Until then, it largely goes by its initials, CPW.
Four initial exhibitions demonstrate the variety of photography today. “My Sister, My Self” features the work of Colleen Kenyon and Kathleen Kenyon, two identical twin sisters who codirected CPW for nearly 25 years. The twins were born in Dunkirk, New York in 1951, both attended Skidmore College, then both studied photography and art at Indiana University.
To be a twin is to learn, quite young, the limitations—and tricks—of the camera. Some works of the Kenyons directly address twinhood, for example, Colleen Kenyon’s Colleen and Kathleen, Shady, New York, December 1979, in which one of the sisters—I’m not sure which—crowns the other’s head with Christmas tinsel.
In 1981, Colleen became CPW’s executive director; in 1982, Kathleen became associate director. Under their guidance, the center offered over 500 workshops, including ones led by Sally Mann and William Wegman. Kathleen edited their journal, Photography Quarterly. Colleen was known for buoyant hand-colored self-portraits; Kathleen produced gently satirical collages. CPW will publish a catalog of this exhibition.
Does everyone have a secret fear that they’ll wind up in a mental hospital? I certainly do. Mary Ellen Mark‘s exhibition “Ward 81” captures the lives of women in a locked psychiatric ward. Mark and writer Karen Folger Jacobs lived and worked for five weeks in the Oregon State Mental Institution in Oregon in 1976.
If you’re expecting freaks, you won’t get them. The weirdest photo shows a woman asleep, with a big picture of Michael Douglas next to her pillow—which wasn’t that odd in 1976. Mark emphasizes the normality of these societal outcasts.
How many of these women took their own lives, one luridly wonders. “Ward 81” was published as a book in 1978, but since then new recordings have been unearthed, and new photographs.
Keisha Scarville‘s exhibition “Recess,” is based on textiles she found in her mother’s closet after her death. (Scarville’s parents were both Guyanese.) The decision to take black-and-white photos of richly colored fabrics gives the work the solemnity of a memorial. Also, the lack of color heightens the physicality of the cloth—the folds and bulges of the fabric. Involuted patterns suggest the twisting pathways of a life.
Scarville, a Brooklyn artist, was the inaugural winner of the Saltzman Prize for emerging photographers, which comes with a $10,000 grant. She was an artist in residence at CPW in 2003.
The fourth exhibition, “Free, For All,” will feature works submitted through an open call during the first two weeks of January. The center bravely aims to hang every single photo they receive, salon style. The pieces must be ready to be mounted. The curators are also planning collaborations with community groups like the Kingston Garden Club, as well as the local high school. The weekly “meet the artist” series will continue.
This article appears in January 2025.
