Direct Positive by Willie Anne Wright

ABOUT THE BOOK

Candela Books is pleased to announce our sixth book release, Direct Positive, with Richmond, Virginia native and fine art photographer, Willie Anne Wright. This new release is scheduled for November 2015 and will be accompanied with an exhibition at Candela Books + Gallery in Richmond, Virginia.

Wright, began her career as a painter. Beginning in the 1970s, her focus shifted to pinhole photography as her primary medium. Direct Positive explores Wright’s innovative use of Cibachrome color material and her production of unique direct positive images. Strangely saturated color, visual distortion and vibrant ideas gave rise to these beautiful and insistent objects.

The artist embraced the unexpected while blending older techniques with diverse contemporary motifs. This one-of-a-kind collection portrays Wright’s mystic journey through pinhole photography. Darkly beautiful in one photograph and then startlingly emotional in the next, each image is unexpected and impactful.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Willie Anne Wright, a Richmond, Virginia native, holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University. She also studied photography at the Maine Photographic Workshops in Rockport, Maine and the Visual Studies Workshops in Rochester, New York. Her paintings, serigraphs and drawings were exhibited widely until 1972 when pinhole photography became her primary creative medium.

Among the institutions that have acquired her photography are the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; Mariner’s Museum, Newport News, Virginia; Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach, Florida; High Museum, Atlanta, Georgia; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana; Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, Alabama; Longwood University, Farmville, Virginia; University of Maine, Bangor, Maine; University of Mary Washington, Fredricksburg, Virginia; Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia; and the New Mexico History Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

ABOUT THE WRITERS

Denise Bethel, formerly Chairman of the Photographs Department at Sotheby’s, Inc., spent over three decades in the photographs auction business in New York, where she set world records for artists ranging from Southworth & Hawes and Alfred Stieglitz to

Edward Weston and Diane Arbus. A Richmond native, she holds a B. A. from Hollins College, Virginia, and an M. A. from London’s Courtauld Institute of Art, where her second year was funded by a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts graduate fellowship. She is now an independent advisor, writer, and lecturer based in New York City.

Dr. Sarah Eckhardt is the Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Her department is responsible for the museum’s early twentieth century European holdings as well as the mid-to-late twentieth-century and twenty-first century collections, including photography and the sculpture garden. She received her B.A. from Valparaiso University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was awarded a Henry Luce Dissertation Fellowship.

Susan Hankla is a poet and short storywriter from southwest Virginia. Her published works have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, New Virginia Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and in numerous chapbooks and poetry collections. She has been a recipient of the Virginia Prize for Fiction from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, a fellow at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and at the Robert Frost Poetry Festival in Franconia, N.H.. She has taught at the Virginia Museum Studio School, University of Richmond’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies, and at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond.

ABOUT THE DESIGNER

Jeff Louviere has been a graphic designer for about 20 years. He concentrates his skills on posters, books, and music packaging. He’s recently won two gold ADDY’s (best book design and best in show) for Louviere+Vanessa’s museum catalog, Coincidence. He’s been inducted into the Guinness Book of World Records for the world’s largest painting (1996), earned two AIGA awards of excellence in poster design and four international design awards for exhibition design.

He lives with his wife and artistic collaborator, Vanessa, in their German Shepherd’s house in New Orleans. Louviere+Vanessa have been in over 50 exhibits and film festivals in America and abroad. They are included in the collections of the Museum of Art | Houston, the Photomedia Center, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the George Eastman House, as well as the film archive for Globians International Film, in Potsdam Germany, and Microcinema, in San Francisco. L+V were recently invited to exhibit for the Ballarat International Foto Biennale.