Labor of Love: Life at Alpha Farm

Downtown Initiative for the Visual Arts, July 3 – August 29

Kate Harnedy did not take her assignment lightly.  What began as a couple-week visit to provide a photo shoot in the community of Alpha Farm became Kate’s primary residence.  There is an intimacy to her photographs that would be hard to achieve if she had not fully integrated herself into the community as she has.  The images do not have the distance that a photojournalist may have brought to us.  They instead include us in private spaces, quiet moments and the daily rhythms of life on Alpha Farm.

Unlike Lewis Forquer’s photographs (written about in the previous post) more information makes these images more rich.  I had the pleasure of spending July 4th at a picnic at Alpha Farm.  The subjects in her photographs were  readily recognizable.  I had the eerie feeling that I had known them before, that we had all been aquantences.  I watched them move about their home, their movements feeling familiar.  Kate has done a wonderful job of bringing us to Alpha Farm in her photographs rather than just showing us Alpha Farm.  There is a distinct difference.

When Kate fist told me that she was going to use the wood from the barn that had burned down before she got there to make her frames I was wary.  It had the potential of crossing the line into sentimentality.  The benefits of becoming intimately acquainted with a community can also be a hinderance because it’s easy to lose objectivity when you are too close.  However, the simple wood frames seem a natural extension to the images and actually help to place them in the physical place where they came from.  They add another layer to the story that would have been lost if she had chosen to present her images with a more gallery-slick presentation.

Because Kate will be part of the community for some time to come, the project will continue.  I look forward to seeing if the images she captures start to shift in nature as her perceptions of the place shift with time.