Photographer Gregory Conniff's First West Coast Exhibition, Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla, CA

Madison, WI, 1979, vintage gelatin silver print  16" x 20"

Gregory Conniff wants us to notice the ordinary details of our visual world, especially houses, buildings and our surrounding landscape.  His 37 vintage gelatin silver prints, measuring 16” x 20” are black and white and cover the years 1979-1982. Some of the photos in this exhibition have never been shown.  Taken in Wisconsin, New Jersey, Virginia, and Washington D.C., these images and others were featured in Conniff’s first book “Common Ground” which the scholar John A. Kouwenhoven called “a major event in the history of photography”. Conniff’s everyday landscapes depict domestic architecture – houses, and the fences, gardens and land adjoining these homes.  These seemingly straightforward photographs, once studied, reveal a beautiful geometry within our ordinary surroundings.  The images emphasize spatial relationships and depth and call attention to the repetition of detailed shapes, shadows, and the juxtaposition of organic and built forms. Conniff wants us to notice what is common, but often invisible – the space around homes and vegetation, the shadows that trees cast on buildings and porches, the repetition of the slats on roofs and its relationship to the slats on buildings, steps and picket fences. His images are of a quiet and mostly organized world void of people but filled with the relationships of our personal landscapes. Exhibition runs through October 26th, Joseph Bellows Gallery.