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Barbara Jaffe

Dark Sun

October 6 – November 5, 2022

Black and white image of woman lying on a mattress with a sheer sheet on top of her, her eyes are closed and her hair is splayed out.
Black and white photographic closeup image of woman holding her interlaced fingers to her throat.
Black and white negative photograph of a man with a fountain pin reading his writing on transparent paper.
Black and white negative photography a well dressed man in a suit and bow tie, from behind and turned away from the camera.
Black and white negative photograph of woman holding and examining a large winged bug under a magnifying glass.
Black and white negative photograph of an orchid plant.
Black and white photographic negative image of a closeup of a hand holding the broken wings of a butterfly.
Black and white negative photograph of a veiled woman holding tarot cards.
Black and white negative photograph of a shirtless man, seen in profile by the ocean shore.
Black and white negative photographic image of woman with short hair sitting and mediating on a mat.
Black and white negative photographic image of a man's face with his eye closed.
Black and white negative photograph of woman holding and examining flowers.
Black and white photographic image of an iris flower.
Black and white negative image of a woman sitting cross legged, sifting sand form her fingers into a box.
Black and white negative photograph of an orchid
Black and white photographic negative of a woman singing at a table with a statue of a bird.

Press Release

"When Barbara Jaffe recently presented me with a copy of her beautiful monograph, DARK SUN, I was deeply struck by how sensual and mysterious her pictures were. Working in a technique that made her prints appear as negatives rather than positives, a process I was familiar with, rooted in the mid 19th century, her pictures hovered on the outer boundaries of representation, providing enough detail to reasonably recognize her subjects, for the most part people she was close to, at the same time suggesting a reality that was more invention than description. Fortunately, this is what I love about photography. Like great music, it often is the instruments that carry the tune, not just the lyrics." - Laurence Miller

Barbara Jaffe’s series DARK SUN embraces the expressive potential of negative photographic images. The reversed tonal values in her prints open up a surprising and sensuous view of the world, as if we are seeing a secret side of things. In 1987, after years of working in color, Jaffe was drawn to the hands-on experimentation offered by her black and white darkroom. Struck by the way one of her photographs seemed utterly transformed when printed as a negative, she initiated her three decade exploration into this process of photographic alchemy. 

In the introduction to her book DARK SUN, curator and critic Lyle Rexer observes that Jaffe’s prints reverse the normal order of things, where typically we understand light to fall on objects: “it is as if the negative unlocked the unknown capacity of objects in the world to emit light.” This inverted quality of light allows us to see things with fresh eyes, revealing the latent spirituality in our everyday world.

 


 

Barbara Jaffe’s work has been widely exhibited, and is in the collection of many museums in the U.S. and abroad, most notably the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum; the Brooklyn Museum; Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi, Belgium and others.

Her book, DARK SUN, has been acquired by the libraries at Harvard, Yale, NYU, UCLA, MassArt, and over 40 others in Europe and Asia.