Bill Bridges: MY Photographic Memory? / Maria Finitzo: Ice and Light

This exhibit features recent work by Bill Bridges in which he explores an alternate possible linkage between memory and photography. He writes, "Some people are said to have 'photographic memories,' the ability to recall comprehensive, detailed pictures of everything they have ever seen. I am asserting that everyone has a photographic memory, but that the type of visual image differs from one person to the next. What I am trying to offer here are not crystallized pictures of the past, but photographs of how my recollections appear in my head." Maria Finitzo will present the first public viewing of her work, entitled Ice & Light. The exhibition revisits a body of photographs made in 1993 on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian High Arctic, one of the most remote and rapidly changing landscapes on earth. Unresolved at the time of their making, the original color transparencies were set aside for three decades before being rediscovered. Their return underscores both the material endurance of analog photography and the fragility of the subjects depicted. The ice shelves of northern Ellesmere Island, among the oldest in the Northern Hemisphere, have since undergone significant loss due to climate change, rendering these images a record of a landscape in disappearance.