NANCY A. SCHERL: DINING ALONE In the Company of Solitude

By The Shore, Homer Restaurant, NY, NY 1994 © Nancy A. Scherl

Private Tent, Julius’, New York, NY 2020 © Nancy A. Scherl

A Burger and Fries, Union Square Coffee Shop, 

New York, NY 1994 © Nancy A. Scherl

A Rose and Wine, Bondini’s, New York, NY 1989 © Nancy A. Scherl

 

Dining Alone: In the Company of Solitude draws attention to the disillusion of the stigma of eating alone…The work spans 35 years, ending in 2020, providing a new context for isolation brought on by the global health crisis. The images unfold in a Cinéma Vérité style so the camera is used to unveil truths in a documentary approach. The 65 plates are a window into trends of fashion and dining establishments over the three decades, reminding us that eating alone still involves being seen.”
– Laura Wzorek Pressley, CENTER, Santa Fe
 

Dining Alone: In the Company of Solitude (Daylight Books)

 

In the late 1980’s, Nancy Scherl began her Dining Alone: In the Company of Solitude series to explore the experience of solitude. As a teenager, she was influenced by Edward Hopper’s work, and then as a young woman, she lived alone in New York’s West Village for many years. There, in West Village restaurants and cafes, she found it comforting to dine alone but in the presence of others. An astute observer of people and with a photographer’s sensibility, Nancy realized how much she was also a subject in her own observations, bringing for her the reality of and questions about the experience of solitude into more vivid focus.

What do her images say about loneliness, social behaviour and our evolving attitudes in public spaces?  Read more in The Guardian, here

 

Dining Alone: In the Company of Solitude 

Photographs by Nancy A. Scherl
Foreword by Laura Pressley
Book Design by Bonnie Briant
Daylight Books, 2022

 

 

SPECIAL EDITION 

100 signed books and special edition prints are available to ORDER here.

CHARITABLE DONATION
Nancy Scherl will donate 50% of all the proceeds for the signed books/prints to CaringMatters and Jasa,

DANIEL W. COBURN: Elizabeth Houston Gallery

Untitled, 2017, from the project Becoming a Specter
Photograph © Daniel Coburn

DANIEL W. COBURN: BECOMING A SPECTER
June 6 – August 17, 2018

"Some photographs faithfully record the world in front of them. Others bend the objects presented to the camera through the mind’s lens, transforming them beyond surface appearances. This latter approach reveals the surrealism already present within the real, confronting us directly with the ambiguities we too often deny."

"Daniel Coburn’s Becoming a Specter traffics in these paradoxes, teasing out the tension below the surfaces of our most intimate conceptions of ourselves and others. Although Coburn’s photographs are domestic, they are never banal. The artist does not buy into the tepid reality of mortgages, traditional families, and material largess. Instead, Becoming a Specter speaks to us in the language of our deeper desires—and fears. It is playful, and yet eerily foreboding. Like water, its meaning is mutable, slipping through our fingers just as we begin to grasp it."

"Water, it seems, takes pride of place in Coburn’s photographs. The artist and his kin submerge themselves in the blinding light of the sea, haloed by the reflective stars of its surface. There are biblical precedents, to be sure, in baptism. But water has its own mercurial symbolism, by turns suggesting troublesome times and undifferentiated chaos as much as it does eternal salvation. The world is birthed through water, all of the best and worst of it. Coburn’s landscapes are more than meets the eye. Like the water that features in them, they are psychological terrain, and oxymoron's the law of the land." ....read more at Elizabeth Houston Gallery 

Daniel Coburn is a recipient of a 2017 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.  He was named as a finalist for the Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture the same year.

DANIEL W. COBURN: BECOMING A SPECTER 

June 6 - August 17

Reception: Wed June 6, 7-9pm

ELIZABETH HOUSTON GALLERY
 

190 Orchard Street, New York, NY