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An orchestrated salute, however noble, can only go so far. It is best, perhaps, to view Jackie Robinson Day as an invitation, a chance to study and understand the complexities and nuances of a man who was much more than a surface-level hero. In that spirit, here are a couple ways to do it.

Reiferson’s collection will be presented as an exhibit, “Jackie Robinson and the Color Line,” from Monday through May 24 at the Gitterman Gallery in New York. The photos and artifacts, including telegrams and letters, comprise more than Robinson’s journey and stretch back to the integrated teams of the late 1800s.

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The exhibition at Gitterman Gallery, which runs from April 15 to May 24, will tell even more forgotten stories through vintage photographs, telegrams, and other artifacts of Black players such as Roy Partlow, Johnny Wright, and Dan Bankhead—lesser-known peers of Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ player renowned for breaking the color barrier in baseball in 1947...

The thread through Reiferson’s collecting is a desire to chronicle American history. The Gitterman Gallery exhibition, for instance, aims to paint a fuller picture of baseball’s slow and difficult path to integration in the U.S., while also revealing the power and beauty of photography. 

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Gitterman Gallery proudly presents Jackie Robinson and the Color Line, an exhibition of the collection of Paul Reiferson, which uses photographs and artifacts to vividly narrate the story of baseball’s journey toward integration. The exhibition opens on Monday, April 15th in honor of Major League Baseball’s Jackie Robinson Day from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and runs through Friday, May 24th.

Jackie Robinson, a trailblazing figure in civil rights, shattered baseball’s color line when Martin Luther King, Jr. was still in college, earning praise from King as “a sit-inner before the sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides.” The exhibition frames Robinson’s odyssey within a larger one that had begun sixty years earlier, when men like Fleet and Weldy Walker, Sol White, Robert Higgins, and Javan Emory played for integrated teams in the late 19^th century.

František Drtikol and Josef Sudek, two Czech avant-garde photographers, have their works paired together for this stunning exhibition, aptly entitled Czech Avant-Garde. Here, the lights and glamor of fame and fortune are replaced for true authenticity, showcasing talent and artisanry like few photography exhibitions do. Drtikol and Sudek are to be studied as true pioneers, and this series proves that their work belongs in the pantheon of the twentieth century’s photography palette.

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The strongest of the images in this small show draw us into Meatyard’s dreamlike world, seducing us with unexpectedly strange and macabre situations. Few photographers since have

explored these spiritual netherworlds with such visual sophistication. Seeing the three series on view here is a particular treat, as they haven’t been shown or reproduced as often as many of Meatyard’s more famous projects. Placed between singular works from the 1960s and the Lucybelle Crater series of the early 1970s, they provide an important stylistic bridge, beginning to connect together a range of separate ideas into more layered narrative forms.

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It's been said that a writer only begins a book; it is the reader who completes it. This is true of writers, but it's also especially true of a photographer like Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Indeed, as one of Meatyard’s best friends, the writer Guy Davenport once observed, many of Meatyard’s photographs are like “charming short stories that have never been written.” 

...This conversation was recorded in my home in Chicago in January 2023. Khalik was wrapping up a short residency with us at Northwestern, and we were sitting by a fire with my dog, Mogu, in the mix....

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Torward a Photography of Depth

...A discussion of Frame’s artistic work requires an understanding of the multiple influences upon his creative imagination. He draws on so many streams of awareness to fuel his aesthetic: growing up in rural Mississippi, his love of film noir and Southern gothic writers (he includes Faulkner and Williams), his experiences as a gay Southerner moving north to attend Harvard, his arrival in New York and his immersion in the downtown arts scene of the 1980s, the horror of AIDS, and the loss of so many friends. He discusses his need to express himself in a range of media: photography, film and video, plays, and essays. He describes a desire to dive deeply into the “heart of darkness” of both the personal and societal unconscious...

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Roswell Angier, whose Combat Zone photos captured part of Boston history, dies at 82

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