In The Gallery
The New Americans
Photographs by Jill Enfield
May 23, 2013-July 23, 2013
As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, who escaped Germany in 1939 to open camera stores in Florida, Jill Enfield has always been passionate about the immigrant experience. A reception is June 20, 6-7:30 p.m.
A fine art and commercial photographer, Enfield spent 20 years focusing on still lives and landscapes. Recently, she has turned her attention to portraits. "As a protest against the profiling and prejudice that has emerged over the last decade, I have been photographing immigrants with the notion that all people who relocate to the United States enrich our hosting culture with their own foreign experience," Enfield says. "Just as the immigrants of yesteryear were ignored or treated with suspicion, so, too, are the new Americans," she says. "We make the same mistakes based on ignorance and fail to perceive the potential of adventurous risk-takers who are more likely than most to transcend the odds and achieve something great. With these strange newcomers arrive new delicacies, art, fashion, architecture, and thought. Every culture evolves because new ideas come in from cultures far away."
Enfield is working with Mary Panzer, an internationally recognized scholar of photography and its history, on a series about new Americans. Panzer interviews the subjects of Enfield's portraits, which will be shown at Ellis Island in NY in the fall of 2013. Enfield has taught hand coloring and non-silver techniques at schools in New York City and throughout the US and Europe. Her work is in collections and has appeared in many magazines around the world. One of her images was among 42 selected from thousands through the Here Is New York Archive to commemorate the fifth anniversary of 9/11.
About the Griffin Museum
The Griffin Museum of Photography was founded in 1992 to provide a forum for the exhibition of both historic and contemporary photography. The Museum houses three galleries dedicated solely to the exploration of photographic arts: the Main Gallery, which features rotating exhibits from some of the world's leading photographers; the Atelier Gallery dedicated to showcasing the works of prominent, up-and-coming artists; and the Griffin Gallery, home to the extensive archives of Museum founder and world-renowned photojournalist Arthur Griffin. For more on the Griffin Museum of Photography, visit www.griffinmuseum.org.