NEW YORK, NY.- Laurence Miller Gallery presents “Will Brown - A Tender Light,” this Philadelphia-based photographer’s first solo exhibition in New York. The show features 29 intimate black and white photographs taken in the early seventies in Queen Village, an old mercantile area in south Philadelphia.

Storefronts, old cars and neighborhood residents are the primary focus here. In Fitzwater Street Caddie, from 1972, we see a bedraggled Cadillac in front of a wall scrawled with graffiti, looking like the bones of a dinosaur that once proudly roamed here. Shop windows were often shot in the early morning when the streets were empty, their dusty windows glowing in the light and criss-crossed with long shadows. Brown’s prints capture a very tender light, similar in feeling to the light in Eugene Atget’s early morning vistas of Paris and the surrounding parks.

Will Brown’s photographs were featured in 2009 in Common Ground: Eight Philadelphia Photographers in the 1960’s and 1970’s at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and in a solo show this past summer at The Fabric Workshop Museum in Philadelphia. His works are held in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and many private collections.

Bruce Wrighton The Downtown Men
Bruce Wrighton died a virtual unknown in 1988 at the age of 38. The Downtown Men, from 1987, was to be his final body of work.

Shot in Binghamton NY, these portraits show the people living on the fringes of a city that, like many across America’s Rust Belt in the 1980s, had been hit hard by suburban development and the decline of traditional manufacturing.

Using a large format camera that required significant time to set up each portrait is the record of what amounted to an informal interview with the subject. In this series Wrighton directed his camera at people struggling at the margins of society “alienated from the mainstream either by their own view of themselves or by society’s view of them”.

Eschewing a purely socio-economic narrative Wrighton sought something more personal and also more essential. Training his camera on the wounded eyes of a young parking attendant and other menial laborers he finds spirits wracked not just by financial hardships but the challenge of self determination itself.