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GALLERY TALK

My Life in Photography

A Review of Lucinda Bunnen's talk March 27, 2004

Think Atlanta , think photography…and the natural progression is to think Lucinda Bunnen . On March 25th at the Atlanta Photography Group gallery, this grande dame of photography, with images and reminisces, took a rapt audience on a journey through her remarkable career.

Bunnen began her love affair with photography in 1970 with her first photo, “Nuns on the Beach in Pensacola .” The latest tribute bestowed on Bunnen, an Atlanta resident since 1952, has been an honorary Chairmanship for the 2004 for the Craft Council from the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation. Between those two mileposts, she has left indelible footprints.

A private collector and philanthropist, Bunnen is also both donor and curator of “Subjective Vision: the Lucinda W. Bunnen Collection of Photographs”, assembled for Atlanta ’s High Museum of Art. She was one of the founders, in 1973, of Nexus, now the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center . In 1992, Ms. Bunnen, along with the same core group of Atlanta photography pioneers, started Photo Forum. She was Photo Forum’s first president.

“Scoring In Heaven; Gravestones and Cemetery Art in the American Sunbelt States”, published by Aperture in 1990 is perhaps the best known of the three books co-authored by Bunnen. Other books are “Movers and Shakers in Georgia ” and “ Alaska : Trail, Tales, and Eccentric Detours”. Bunnen has garnered twenty-plus one-person shows, the most recent : “Edges, Exposures and Mayhem” at Agnes Scott College, “Burkina Faso in Black and White + Color” at the Kubatana Moderne Gallery and (Dis) Similarities”, Portraiture by Lucinda Bunnen , “ at City Gallery East. The latter given by the City of Atlanta , Bureau of Cultural Affairs., presenting its 10th Annual Master’s Series.

Bunnen’s work graces the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Pushkin Museum in Moscow, Russia, the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. and the High Museum in Atlanta .

By associations, acquisitions or family ties, there seems to be only one or two degree of separation between Bunnen and such lights of photography as Minor White, Imogene Cunningham, Harry Callahan, Cindy Sherman, Edward Weston, Duane Michaels , Ansel Adams and Eudora Welty. Yet, the spark in the eyes of this woman attests to a mind that can still be astonished and wonder-struck. In the seventies, she experimented with solarization, infrared, double negatives and collages. Today, through the marvel of computers, she is printing her work on silk jackets. Bunnen left the audience with a quote from Chip Simone : “May you see the world with the eyes of a sage and the wonder of a child and may you find the strength to use your eyes courageously and to look at everything with passion and abandon.”

Marcia Blake