Taking Liberties

Just in time for the 2012 presidential election as well as the release of Steven Spielberg’s Richmond-filmed “Lincoln,” Candela Books + Gallery presents Taking Liberties, a selection of photographs from Virginia photographer Greta Pratt. The exhibition draws on several series of her work including “Using History,” her portraits of The Association of Lincoln Presenters, called “Nineteen Lincolns,” “The Wavers,” which document Liberty Tax Service employees, and the most recent “Trail Maids.

Pratt is assistant professor of photography at Old Dominion University, author of two esteemed books of photographs, and a past Pulitzer Prize nominee. Her work is housed in major public and private collections including Smithsonian American Art Museum and The Museum of Contemporary Photography, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times and American Art.

Pratt’s photographs, while on the surface offering innocuous gloss and humor, ultimately ask meaningful questions about American culture, particularly the construction and celebration of our national history. In Pratt’s own words,

“…Everyone is trying to connect to the past but the past is always fiction. How history is told reveals much more about the people and time period that are telling it than about history itself.”

Taking Liberties seeks both to give an honorable survey of Pratt’s body of photographic work, as well as stimulate timely discussion about American history and politics in the making.