Garden State Lens

In this major exhibition, candid photography—unscripted, unposed images taken from everyday life—by eleven contemporary artists explore the lives lived in the nation’s most densely populated and ethnically diverse state. Garden State Lens presents scenes of New Jerseans going about their everyday lives. We see them raise their families, earn a living, come together as a community, and enjoy the state’s great outdoors. Powerful images—some printed at titanic scale, others more modestly sized—upend the typecast idea of our state through popular television shows and social media. More than 100 photographs on view instead offer nuanced and authentic glimpses of the incredible human tapestry that makes contemporary life in the state so exceptional.

From a visual chronicle of the Cowtown Rodeo to the elegance of the state’s monumental industrial sites such as the IMTT Bayonne Terminal and attendees at a lively street festival in Jersey City, the photographers—each active in New Jersey today, and working in color and black and white media—ply their talent in capturing a snapshot of contemporary life in the state. Among the Museum’s collections, there is an important cache of photographs and photographic equipment that will be included in the exhibition. As a powerful counterpoint to today’s photography, a portfolio commissioned by the Museum in 1997 by Barbara Beirne as a photo essay on the work of the Community Foodbank of NJ will be installed along with a selection of vintage cameras.

Participating artists include: Ben MacMaster, Christy Warren, Cynthia Egle, Dorie Dahlberg, Edward Fausty, Erik James Montgomery, Frank Hanavan, Jean Paul Picard, Joya Angola Thompson, Sean Burns, and Tolu Olasoji.

Associate Curator Bryant Small organized this exhibition for the Morris Museum.

Image credit: Dorie Dahlberg, Ruins: Cycling In The Casino (detail). Asbury Park, New Jersey. PH21 Gallery, Budapest Hungary.