About Love
June 7 – July 1, 2012
“I could not have learned about love without photography, and I am still learning.”
Blue Sky is proud to present a selection of original prints by renowned photographer Gay Block from her most recent career survey publication, About Love (Radius Books, 2011). Included in this presentation are portraits from all of Block’s major photographic projects since 1973, including “Bertha Alyce,” “The Women the Girls Are Now,” “Rescuers,” and “South Miami Beach.”
“Through photography I have learned about love. These are lessons I hadn’t learned at home or in school. I began making portraits so I could ask people about their lives and their values. Their answers helped form and shape me. Through them I began to know who I could be and what indiscriminate empathy and love could feel like. I have been grateful that others pushed the medium of photography into new realms but that has not been my pursuit. I began with my mother because I had no other way to approach understanding her. It took me ten years after her death but it was a happy day when I began to miss her. Making other portraits fueled my hunger to know more people who would open me to love – the Yiddish community of South Miami Beach, the camp girls, their beauty and promise all over their faces, rescuers who risked their lives to save Jews, and all the people who generously allowed me to ask them personal questions, hard questions, that led to my feeling each was my best friend. Especially rescuers – they filled me with love and hope.”
Gay Block began making portraits in 1973, first photographing her affluent Jewish community in Houston, Texas. Block’s early projects, South Miami Beach and Camp Girls-1981 and 2006, resulted in both photographic portraits and films, as did her 30-year project about her mother, Bertha Alyce: Mother exPosed, a book and traveling exhibit. Her landmark work with writer Malka Drucker, RESCUERS: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust, a book, film and traveling exhibition, opened in 1992 at MoMA, NY and was seen internationally in over fifty venues. Radius Books redesigned and republished the book in 2020. About Love: Photographs and Films, 1973-2011, was published by Radius Books in 2011. Block’s photographs are included in several museums and private collections including The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, MoMA, New York, and San Francisco MoMA.