Featured exhibition:
John Ganis: ENDANGERED COASTS
May 27 - August 28, 2022
curated by William Messer
In his second solo exhibition at Iris photographer John Ganis employs a topographic aesthetic that combines straightforward, highly detailed color photographs with GPS locations and elevations for each site, to record low-lying areas from Texas to Maine that are often over-developed and increasingly vulnerable to high tides and storm surges from violent storms. World sea levels could rise more than 6 feet this century, threatening to make large portions of the coastal areas of the United States, and the planet generally, unsustainable, with catastrophic consequences. While the Ohio River valley is not the US Atlantic or Gulf coasts, the effect of the climate collapse will mean more severe storms, flooding and hillside erosion in our area as well. The exhibition is accompanied by Ganis’ second book, America’s Endangered Coast (George Thompson Publishing, with introductions by James Hansen and Liz Wells), available during the exhibition.
John Ganis grew up in Delaware, Ohio, the son of a professor at Ohio Wesleyan University, from which he acquired his BA (during which time he also interned for Irving Penn and studied with Lisette Model in New York City). For the following six years he again lived in NYC, driving a cab and working with photographer Larry Fink. He later acquired an MFA in Photography from the University of Arizona (where he studied with Harold Jones, Todd Walker and W. Eugene Smith). He is currently Professor Emeritus at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, retiring in 2017 after 37 years teaching fine art photography, dividing his time between the west coast of Florida and Canada’s Bruce Peninsula and continuing his photographic projects.
Photographs by John Ganis have been exhibited in numerous museums and university galleries across the country, in Canada and Europe, and are held in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Center for Creative Photography, The Denver Art Museum, The Detroit Institute of Arts, The George Eastman Museum, The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, The New York Public Library and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. His photographs have been published in Aperture Magazine, Camera Austria, Photographie and Photo Technik International, included the Houston FotoFest exhibition and catalog Earth as well as the international catalogs Shrinking Cities and Imaging a Shattering Earth and their accompanying exhibitions, and discussed and reproduced in Liz Wells’ Land Matters, Landscape Photography Culture and Identity and Lucy Lippard’s A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics and Art in the Changing West, most recently in Miles Orvell’s Empire of Ruins (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Terry Barrett’s Criticizing Photographs (sixth edition, Routledge Press, 2021).
For more information visit americasendangeredcoasts.com
Previous exhibition:
Andrew Borowiec: From the Heartland
curated by William Messer
Andrew Borowiec has photographed America's changing industrial and post-industrial landscape for over three decades. His work has been exhibited around the world and are a part of major art collections, institutions, and museums throughout the country.
Borowiec has received major fellowships and awards throughout his career as a photographer, photojournalist, author and professor.