Continuing through April 23, 2016
Suzanne Paul was an innovative photographer who captured Houston’s developing art scene from the 1970s through the 1990s. After Paul passed away in 2005 her daughter worked with the gallery to establish an archive of the photographer’s negatives, slides, prints and related materials. Paul began shooting at age 9 when her father gave her a Kodak Brownie camera. Eventually, she used a 1957 Rolleiflex twin lens and a Holga camera with a plastic lens, followed by a 35 mm camera and a medium-format view camera.
Paul’s breakthrough came in 1976, when the Contemporary Arts Museum’s then Director James Harithas commissioned her to photograph artists and installations for the museum’s publications. He also gave her the first one-woman exhibition at the museum that summer. Paul almost always worked in black and white, and did her own printing. According to her daughter, Mercedes, she would spend hours in the darkroom, “going over the film and proof sheets trying to figure out which images she wanted to print.”
The show includes a series of ten enlarged contact proof sheets of artists, curators and patrons. Portraits include influential figures from Houston’s art world such as museum curators Harithas, Anne Wilkes Tucker and Alison De Lima Greene; artists Mel Chin, Rick Lowe, Dick Wray, Jesse Lott and Lucas Johnson; and playwright Edward Albee. These and other subjects are direct, honest, playful, often quirky and mostly memorable, the result of Paul’s consistent passion for portraiture. Included are early photos of Paul with her family and a tray of slides projected in rotation onto a gallery wall.
