Aether Photo

Announcing The Ten

For Immediate Release

Contact Jennifer Schwartz

jennifer@jenniferschwartzgallery.com

(404) 885-1080

Announcing the launch of The Ten:

a highly curated monthly online exhibit of ten photographic images for sale

www.thetenphoto.com

Atlanta, GA.  Jennifer Schwartz Gallery is proud to present The Ten, an online venture launched June 10, 2011.  The first Ten features the work of gallery photographer Rachel Barrett.

Jennifer Schwartz Gallery’s mission is to go beyond the traditional gallery model and explore the new contemporary photographic landscape to help our artists move their careers forward and introduce their work to a larger audience.  We want to marry the opportunities for exposure online with the ability to acquire limited edition fine art photographs in order to help photographers reach a large audience and make money to finance the creation of future work.

And so we have created The Ten.

The Ten is a highly curated monthly online exhibit of ten photographic images.  Each image is available at a 13x19 size in an edition of 25 for $250.  Whether a photographer makes a new body of work for The Ten, a guest curator selects images from different photographers, or a photographer self-curates from within his or her existing bodies of work, The Ten is an opportunity for photographers and curators to explore the creative possibilities of pulling together a selection of work with a strong statement and a tight edit.

The uniqueness of The Ten comes from its curation and its exclusivity.  Images on The Ten cannot be sold in any other size in any other location.  Once an image has been included in The Ten, it must be retired from sale.  The only opportunity to purchase that image is on the website for The Ten, and once 25 are sold, it is sold out forever.

The Ten puts up a creative challenge to photographers and curators that we feel is important to keep the medium fresh and relevant.

The first Ten features the work of Rachel Barrett.  Born in 1981 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Rachel Barrett moved to New York City in 1999 to study at New York University and received her BFA in Photography & Imaging from The Tisch School of the Arts in 2003 and her MFA in Photography, Video & Related Media from The School of Visual Arts in 2008.  Much of her work is deeply rooted in nostalgia, memory and identity and the act of making photographs fulfills her desires to collect the present and preserve the past.  Barrett is currently an adjunct professor of photography at Kingsborough Community College and The College of Staten Island.  A 2010-11 Tierney Fellow and 2011 PDNs 30, Barrett has received numerous other awards and honors for her personal work.  She has shown nationally in both solo and group shows, including exhibitions at The Camera Club of New York, Clark | Oshin, Barbara Krakow Gallery, Sara Tecchia, The Minneapolis Center for Photography and The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.  Her work has been published in The Sunday New York Times, Photo District News, Russian Esquire and Next American City Magazines and acquired into several private collections. 

Barrett’s intense focus on her subject, whether the landscape or the people who inhabit those areas, helps uncover the intricacies of an interconnected community.  Barrett’s project Bolinas is an earnest look at a small, unincorporated and largely off-the-grid community in Northern California, resting precariously on the coast of the Pacific. Dirt roads with hand-painted signs mark the pathways between a notoriously reclusive population with a rich cultural and agricultural history dating back to the 1920s, with a flowering in the late 1960s after the Summer of Love.  A collective effort to clean up after an oil spill brought the people of Bolinas together, and the desire to live an intrinsically shared existence with one another and closely to the land on their own terms is how they decided to stay.  There are no longer any true communes in town but that same sharing mentality of perpetual exchange and engagement persists.  

For The Ten, Barrett chose to curate a collection of images from within the larger Bolinas body of work.  This “story within a story” focuses on the Murch family and Gospel Flats Farms.  The Gospel Flats farm stand welcomes visitors to Bolinas and sets the mood for the entire community.  A generational owned family stand which works exclusively on the honor system and provides the greater Bolinas community with bounties and arrays of vegetables, fruits, flowers and recently eggs.  As long as the cycle of life continues and the land there grows, so will the legacy of the Murch family and their farm.  For it is the land, the near religious connection to it, the need to take responsibility for it and give back to it, which inspires the entire community to choose to create this path in life.

The Barrett Ten provides a glimpse into the Bolinas community by focusing on one family’s connection to the land they inhabit and the neighbors that they support and who in turn support the farm.

The Ten is a project created by Jennifer Schwartz Gallery.  Jennifer Schwartz Gallery is located at 1000 Marietta Street, Suite 112, Atlanta, GA 30318.  Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 11 A.M. to 5 P.M. and by appointment.   For more information call the gallery at (404) 885-1080 or visit www.jenniferschwartzgallery.com and www.thetenphoto.com.