Thoughts on Sag Harbor in Focus
Photo credit: Michael Heller, Sag Harbor Express
For the last five years, working closely with art teacher Peter Solow, students studying photography at Pierson High School have been asked to create work that explores various photographic genres using Sag Harbor as their muse. The result of this exercise has culminated each year in a juried exhibition called Sag Harbor in Focus, which has been shown at various venues in the Village (Dodds & Eder, the Whaling Museum, the John Jermain Library).
Sag Harbor in Focus was meant to encourage the local kids to see where and how they live with fresh eyes, to re-examine and question what they’d taken for granted or had overlooked. This is the discipline of artmaking and the engine of creativity. Simply put, art transforms the local into the universal through the lens of the gifted eye.
This is the first year that April and I have been able to exhibit their work at The Church. It has been a year of Covid and quarantine. Sag Harbor, as muse, got a whole lot smaller and a whole lot more local. Our lives have all been affected by the fear, anxiety and isolation this pandemic has caused. We had to go indoors. We went inside ourselves. But through this uncertainty, this sudden and unforeseen change of plans that forced us to jump start our resourcefulness, determination and resilience, we found out a lot about ourselves, our families, our neighbors and our friends.
What is so uplifting in seeing this exhibition, is that in this most extraordinary of times, the Pierson photographers did not suddenly go blind. They did not shy away from harsh truths. They did not shut down. They steadfastly documented the moment we are all living through with their eyes clear and wide open.
In these wonderful photographs, both individually and collectively, you see an eloquence and courage in their acknowledgment that the world and their town had suddenly become terrarium-like, microcosmic, and sometimes lonely. These photographers have reduced the language they used to describe it, becoming a world of nouns; the bed, the dog, the table, the computer screen, the book, the window, the mask, the eye, the shadow and the light. And with this reduced language they have captured and expanded how we can understand not only what they have been dealing with but what we all have gone through in this terrible crisis. And this is the true nature of art.
Shout-outs go to Pierson Faculty members, Peter Solow and Liz Cataletto, for their inspired teaching and dogged determination to keep all heads above water, to the Reutershan Foundation, to Ray and Carol Merritt’s Cygnet Foundation for their financial support, and to Mary Ellen Bartley for her trained and judicious eye in making the selection of works and awarding the winners. It has been a celebration of a real achievement.
– Eric Fischl
