Willard Traub at the Danforth Museum

Recovery 1, photograph

September 11, 2011 - November 6, 2011

Members Preview Reception: Saturday, September 17, 6pm - 8pm

Poetry Reading: Sunday, September 18, 1pm

Photographer Willard Traub will read poetry and prose poems he's written to illuminate photographs in Recovery.

Exhibition catalogs available, with a portion of sale proceeds to be donated to Be the Match Foundation, the national clearinghouse for bone marrow transplant donors and recipients.

Artist Talk: Wednesday, September 21, 12:30pm

About the Exhibit

Willard Traub: Recovery is an exhibition of unique photographs that impose the lens of human experience on the healing process, Traub’s strong, emotional images directly connect us to an artist who might have been critically ill, but remained actively engaged. In her essay for the exhibition catalog, Karen Haas, The Lane Collection Curator of Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, compares Traub’s pictures to the early photographs of Alfred Stieglitz or still lifes by Josef Sudek. She also remarking on their complexity. These pictures “are political,” she observes, allowing Traub “to gain a much-needed sense of control in the face of this seemingly out-of-control disease.” And, they are “also symbolic, as he has come to see them as signifying larger issues, such as love, loss, sustenance, and healing.”

About the Artist

Willard Traub is a Massachusetts based photographer whose interests range from the commercial photography of architecture to teaching to fine art photography. Recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Photography Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a Polaroid Foundation Grant, his work is represented in private, museum and corporate collections, both nationally and abroad. The artist currently lives in Wayland, MA and works from his studio at the Saxonville Studios in Framingham.

For more information on the exhibition,

visit the Danforth Museum's website

Milestone

This week John Liz will mark one of those milestone birthdays. In honoring his request for no organized celebratory attempts I will not disclose what day nor which milestone.

John and I started working together on August 26^th, 1985 at Spectrum Color Labs in Boston. A few years later when I left to co-found Color Services I tried to convince him to follow. His loyalty to the late Walter Urbanowicz, Spectrum’s founder, prevailed, leavened I would guess by a certain amount of doubt as to his prospects in joining a startup with little assurance of survival. I tried a couple of times in the ensuing years to convince him to jump ship, to no avail. When Spectrum closed it’s doors suddenly in 2006 there was no real question for either of us and once again we were working together.

I haven’t known a harder working or more dedicated individual. Before most of us are awake each and every morning John is already at work in the lab. He makes everything and everyone around him better. Photography and life still excite him. Anyone who has notched a milestone or two knows how important and rare that is.

One day it is 1985 and as a young fellow you put your head down and set to work at the task at hand. Seemingly overnight it is 2011 and when you look up that youth and those years are rapidly receding in the distance…

For those years and all the good work, thank you John.

Happy birthday from us all.