Peter Donahoe
| Mr. Donahoe has been a photographer for more than thirty
years. He has worked in fashion and commercial studios in Manhattan, has
been a police photographer for the New York City Police Department, has
used electron microscopes to photograph the ultrastructure of cells and
his documentation of the working life of NYC’s cab drivers was published
by New Amsterdam Books in 1991as The Night Line, a Memoir of Work. Twenty
–five photographs from this work were requested by the Museum of
the City of New York for its permanent collection. He has received two
Special Opportunity Stipend awards from the New York Foundation for the
Arts, most recently in November to travel to France for an exhibition
that featured his Hudson Valley pinhole camera landscapes. Ten years ago he began using pinhole cameras exclusively as a reaction
against the growing cult of digitized imagery. As a ‘wet darkroom’
printer he has achieved a color range and luminosity in his sepia and
selenium toned gelatin silver black and white prints that are markedly
different from ink based laser printed digitized photography. The long
time exposures used to make his negatives show the contrast of the motion
of trees, water and sky against the solidity of barns and silos. His work
falls into the practice of what has come to be called photography’s
antiquarian avant-garde: those who have embraced the discarded process
of early photography (cyanotype, daguerreotype, collodion and albumen)
and optical primitivism (pinhole and zone plate photography) and are re-inventing
the history of photography. |
|
|
PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION HISTORY ONE PERSON EXHIBITIONS |
|
| 11/02 “18 Towns: The Barns and Farmsteads of Columbia County” |
Brandow’s and Company Hudson, NY |
| 11/01 “Paysages de la Revolution Industrielle, Photographies d’Architecture Rural” - Pinhole Camera Landscapes of the Hudson River Valley |
Galerie Nataal
|
| 11/97 “The Internal/External Landscape:
|
Spencertown Academy
|
| 5/96 “The Kinderhook Creek Series - A Continuing Project “ |
A Country Garden at Antinore, Old Chatham, NY |
| 10/95 “The Kinderhook Creek Series” and other recent pin hole camera landscapes |
Silver Lining Gallery, Kinderhook, NY |
| 2/95 “Pin Hole Camera Landscapes and Portraits |
Columbia-Greene Community College, Hudson, NY |
| 10/77 “Sacred Space - Ritual Action”
|
Pratt Institute,
|
| TWO PERSON EXHIBITIONS |
|
| 2/03 “The Two Landscapes/Les Deux Paysages: the Hudson Valley and the Aquitaine” |
North Pointe Gallery Kinderhook, NY |
| 4/94 “The Rings of Perception” Recent Pin Hole Camera Landscapes and Portraits, showing along with Patricia Nolan’s hand colored photographs |
Spencertown Academy, Spencertown, NY |
| 10/91 “Nudes and Portraits From the Past Fifteen Years” showing along with Spanish Surrealist Painters |
Galleria Grupo Arte Albany, NY |
| 3/90 “Rural Eye, Urban Eye: Photo Essays showing photographs from the Night Line series along with Charles Winter’s rural photographs |
Kingsborough Community College, Brooklyn, NY |
GROUP EXHIBITIONS |
|
| Numerous group exhibitions over the past thirty years. Beginning in 1972 as a member of SohoPhoto Gallery and continuing thru the mid-1980’s at numerous artist-run cooperative and community galleries in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Since the late 1980’s I have shown in a number of Hudson Valley and Capitol Region venues from the Warren Street Gallery, Five Points Gallery, Spencertown Academy, North Pointe, etc. | |
PUBLICATIONS- BOOKS |
|
| 12/90 The Night Line, A Memoir of Work published by New Amsterdam Books, NYC [see ‘Collections’ below] | |
GRANTS RECEIVED |
|
| 2002 Grant awarded under the Decentralization Program of the
New York State Council on the Arts to pursue the yearlong project ‘Barns
and Farmsteads of Columbia County’ using the pinhole cameras that
I have been making and using for the past 12 years. 10/01 Special Opportunity Stipend awarded by the Rensselaer County Council for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts to travel to France and send work to the Galerie Nataal in Arcachon for the first European exhibition of my work 7/91 Special Opportunity Stipend awarded by the Rensselaer County Council for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts to complete the donation of work to the Museum of the City of New York [from The Night Line series] |
|
COLLECTIONS |
|
12/88 Museum of the City of New York acquires 25 prints
from The Night Line portfolio for the permanent collection; seen as a
unique work reflecting a working-class perspective on NYC at night. The
photographs document my two years as a New York City cab driver showing
the City at night from the physical and social perspective of a cab driver. Present My work is represented in a number of private collections. |
|
|
|
