Derek Eller Gallery is pleased to present a historic exhibition of photographs by Thomas Barrow (1938-2024). Beginning in the 1960’s, Barrow pioneered new photographic methods and challenged the limited physicality of photography by pushing the medium into unprecedented forms. His series Cancellations (1974-1981), a selection of which will be on view, is a quintessential example of this innovation.
In Cancellations, Barrow responded to the disparate photographic trends of the mid-70’s: the survey-like, documentary approach to the American landscape as practiced by New Topographics photographers like Bernd and Hilla Becher, and the desire to utilize photography in a more manipulative, experimental fashion. To that end, he shot banal landscapes and interiors and then aggressively tore through the emulsion on the negatives with an ice pick, marking them with an X. In other instances, Barrow abraded the negative with sandpaper or punched it with holes. In many, there is a considered effort to use the disturbance as a subtle comment on the composition. A sandpaper rubbing echos the erosion of land in Field Abrasion, an X slices across the telephone wires in Cut.
Barrow’s chosen terrain was mainly the Southwest, with forays into California. His images of the gritty and sometimes lunar-like New Mexican desert are particularly notable, given his commitment to Albuquerque where he lived and worked for much of his life. The otherworldly Fiesta Fence pictures the annual autumn hot air balloon festival, where balloons descend on the city of Albuquerque like alien space ships. Barrow composed the scene from behind a fence, with his jagged cancellation X snagging on the barbed wire.
From his early days as a student of Aaron Siskind and throughout a career of over fifty years, Barrow staked a firm place for himself within the history of fine art photography. An iconoclast and intellectual, he is a forerunner for the generation of contemporary artists concerned with pushing the limits of photography.
Thomas Barrow has been featured in recent group exhibitions such as The ’70s Lens: Reimagining Documentary Photography at National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C; Sightlines: Photographs from the Collection at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and Site Reading at The Morgan Library, New York, NY. His work is in numerous public collections including the Hammer Museum, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art. Barrow had a mid-career retrospective at LACMA and SFMoMA in 1986. This will be his fifth solo exhibition at the Gallery.