May 2010 – June 2010
I try to focus on the intangible spirit of a place that, for those who live there, represents their daily landscape.
Monica Denevan
Monica Denevan has been taking photographs since she was about ten years old, using her mother's instamatic camera to record family and friends. Later, she studied photography at San Francisco State University. In the late 1990s, she began to travel to Latin America and Southeast Asia. Denevan has exhibited in the United States, Burma, Cambodia, Hong Kong, and Europe.
Her primary artistic influences are Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, prominent American artists known for their portrait and fashion photography. She found inspiration in Irving Penn's Worlds in a Small Room series, admiring his lush printing style. For Denevan, Richard Avedon's early Paris fashion photography has a compelling cinematic quality.
She photographs with a medium-format, Bronica film camera, appreciating its square-print format and the camera's in-the-field toughness. Denevan prints her work in a conventional wet darkroom; each edition comprises twenty-five prints. There is only one print size, which is a fifteen-by-fifteen-inch image on sixteen-by-twenty-inch photographic paper.
Denevan has traveled to photograph cultures and traditions in Southeast Asia, particularly in Burma and China. Burmese rivers and landscapes create haunting and mystical settings for her beautifully composed portraits, which are reminiscent of vintage black-and-white fashion photographs. By documenting people in remote places relatively untouched by development, Denevan illuminates traditional cultures and lifestyles, reflecting their deep authenticity and reverence for the past.
Photography is not permitted.
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This exhibit is beyond the screener checkpoint, where only ticketed passengers are allowed.