All images, writing, content, design and layout on this website are Copyright © Teri Darnell and/or Alan Chimacoff, 2005-2024. All rights reserved.
Artists: Teri Darnell (images on left) and Alan Chimacoff (images on right)
Our wish in presenting these photographs in pairs is to demonstrate that deep artistic kinships and deep friendships can grow out of improbably divergent backgrounds and that differences disappear when using a common set of underlying principles that govern visual compositions and bridge the gulf of cultural origins.
Our backgrounds are dramatically different. Teri Darnell is a gay woman from Atlanta, a United States Air Force veteran, an MBA, and a retired UPS corporate executive. She lives in Cumming, Georgia. Alan Chimacoff is a Jewish man from New Jersey, a northeast ‘urban suburbanite,’ a Cornell and Harvard alumnus, a retired design architect and a former university professor. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Teri’s images express the diverse cultures in Atlanta on Cheshire Bridge Road, and in other cities around the globe. She captures picturesque abstractions of the urban and rural world. Alan photographs New York City, venturing more broadly to neighboring Trenton, NJ, Philadelphia and Los Angeles in pursuit of urban essences and visual abstraction.
While much of today’s photography and discussions of it seem to concentrate on social and cultural issues, almost to the exclusion of the essential visual characteristics of all two-dimensional art, our work is different. Our pictures emphasize visual principles: organizing structures, spatial relationships, pictorial and abstract composition, real and illusory depth and the relation of objects and space to the ‘picture plane,’ and all of these have a profound influence on how social and cultural meanings are conveyed
Our highly structured photographs display an exquisite synergy together while each concentrates on dramatically different aspects of humanity. Teri’s pictures explore often neglected or disappearing cultures, displaying them with a caring reverence. In Teri’s images the people themselves are center stage. Alan’s pictures look at physical, sometimes functional things people have made to support our lives, and how these things have fared as society has grown, developed and changed, and as the forces of nature have acted on them. His images force the viewer to concentrate on background as foreground.
It is precisely because our images are based in common visual principles that the diversity of our backgrounds and the diversity of content of our pictures can be transcended. The essence of the exhibition is the powerful visual kinship in our work; the differences are the differences of personal style. To make the strongest demonstration of this, our photographs are presented in adjacent pairs— not as two separate bodies of work on different sides of the same space.
Please contact Alan Chimacoff at alan@chimacoff.com or visit his website at alan@chimacoff.com for more information about his images.
PAIRS 2023