PAM MENDELSOHN
REBEKAH BURGESS
photography
August 9 - September 12, 2008
Email: corinnelouisedesign@yahoo.com
Pam Mendelsohn and Rebekah Burgess are mother and daughter. They have always enjoyed sharing their photographs, taking pictures together, and talking about photography. When Rebekah was preparing to go off to college from California to New York, she commented that Pam didn't seem to want to talk about anything else but The Grand Departure and Empty Nest Syndrome. The two decided to have a photography exhibit called Points of View: A Mother-Daughter Retrospective. The show was at Plaza Design in Arcata, California in May, 1992 which is half a lifetime ago for Rebekah.
Interest in photography expanded for both mother and daughter. Pam started entering juried competitions and having one or two-person shows. She also developed a workshop bringing together disabled and nondisabled children in Moscow for a series of photography activities. Rebekah sells her photographs through a variety of microstock agencies. Her interest in photography increased exponentially: she received her PhD in American Studies with a specialty in photographic history two months ago. The time seemed right to have another show together.
Pam: As we prepared for this show, I tried to look for similar points of view in our photography. I think that we both search for what is beautiful in everyday objects or scenes. Who thinks of vacant movie seats as beautiful? Yet, Bekah's photograph of them causes us to look at these ordinary objects in a whole other way. We also both look for the pageantry involved with any kind of parade or celebration. Her photos of the Caribbean parade in Brooklyn and mine of Halloween in Greenwich Village serve as springboards for stories yet untold. We both like images that include text. We both like to photograph walls.
Both of us take great delight in the process of getting from point A to point B in our travels, visual feasting and documenting all along the way. Bekah has turned her focus very close to home in Brooklyn; my focus tends to be on places far from Arcata: Moscow, London, Oaxaca, New York, Los Angeles. Being En Route (be it a few miles from home or thousands of miles away) is a wonderful destination, an opportunity to view and document what we, humans, are capable of creating in this constructed environment of ours.
Pam Mendelsohn
510-798-3030
pamwiltravel@yahoo.com
www.pamslens.com
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Pam Mendelson
  
Rebekah Burgess
Rebekah: Our cameras are always out and clicking away when we spend time together. We even considered constructing this show around paired images of the same places and objects that we had taken while out on various adventures in tandem. What's extraordinary is how differently we frame, and view, the exact same tableaus. In the end, we realized that even when we're not out together with our cameras, we really are attracted to similar visual cues. The connections between our images are especially surprising given the disparity in our everyday environments.
I live in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, an incredibly diverse community merely fifteen minutes by subway from downtown Manhattan. One can see the peak of the Chrysler Building from the avenue that runs by the brownstone apartment I live in, but the neighborhood often feels far removed. Strong cultures overlap in my neighborhood. Worshippers in long beards and dark coats arrive by foot at the Hasidic synagogue across the street each Friday night. A few doors down, the barrel placed in front of The Spice Is Right Jamaican storefront emits the aroma of Jerk Chicken even at 2 in the morning. The majority of images I gathered for this show were taken within a three-block radius of my home, trying to capture the visual feast that I'm lucky enough to witness daily.
Rebekah Burgess
917-774-5601
rebekahburgess@gmail.com
rebekahburgess.blogspot.com/
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