Rick Wester Fine Art is proud to present Here, recent photographs by Jessica Todd Harper. Continuing her exploration of portraiture as a means of marking time, the exhibition features a selection of images from her third monograph of the same title released by the Italian publisher, Damiani. In Here, Jessica Todd Harper plies her knowledge and deep appreciation of portraiture from Vermeer to Cassatt with a sensitivity to light and composition, serving to create subtle tensions in the genre of the family photograph. The photographer is known for bringing a complex contemporary overlay to traditional photographic representation of the psychological ties in familial relationships. As in the work of photographers such as Garry Winogrand, Larry Fink (for whom Harper worked as an assistant and studio manager early in her career) and Tina Barney, she takes in the performances inherent in human interaction but distills meaning in gestures, whether someone stares into the camera or, as what often happens in Here, looks away. Once again she takes on her family, her friends and herself as subjects, so that over the course of the publishing of her three books beginning with Interior Exposure in 2008 to Here, the family’s familiar faces are added to and change with the effects of time. In that lies the universal quality of her photographs – the passing of the years happens to everyone.

Todd Harper is a highly decorated photographer. She was the 2016 Outwin Boocheever Portrait Prize Finalist and is currently featured in Kinship, an exhibition of contemporary photography at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. She also currently has a solo exhibition at Le Centre Claude Cahun in Nantes, France.

Signed copies of Here will be available through the gallery’s website.