Carl Chiarenza: Journey into the Unknown

Rochester, N.Y., February 4, 2021—The George Eastman Museum, will premiere a retrospective of artist Carl Chiarenza’s (American, b. 1935) nearly seventy-year career this winter. The exhibition, Carl Chiarenza: Journey into the Unknown, was curated by William Green and will open at the Eastman Museum tomorrow. It will remain on view through June 20.

This retrospective exhibition spans the Rochester-based artist’s entire career, beginning with early photographs Chiarenza made as a high school student in Rochester in the 1950s and concluding with a large selection of his most recent collage work. It highlights his accomplishments not only as a photographer, but also as a longtime professor of art history, a renowned critic, and an award winning biographer. The exhibition gives visitors the opportunity to follow the continuities and ruptures in Chiarenza’s artistic journey as his career enters its seventh decade.

At the heart of Chiarenza’s work is an exploration of the very nature of photography. Throughout his career, Chiarenza has demonstrated that photographs can provide much more than just documentary evidence. Whether photographing the postindustrial landscape or torn-up scraps of paper, Chiarenza uses the camera to transform his subjects into new, formally sophisticated and psychologically complex images. His photographs often bear little resemblance to their actual subjects and instead suggest mysterious worlds that viewers are invited to explore.  In this way, Chiarenza makes photographs that are evocative and introspective, and that function more like music or poetry than the documentary medium we too often expect photography to be.

To accompany the exhibition, the George Eastman Museum has published a 64-page exhibition catalogue with texts by William Green and Keith Davis. The catalogue is now available at the George Eastman Museum Shop.

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