A spokesperson says---
“...The Eyes and Ears of the People, by award-winning photographer, writer, poet, playwright and filmmaker, Alan Govenar... series of photographs portraying individuals from a wide range of cultural backgrounds and traditions.
The exhibition reflects decades of Govenar’s documentary work exploring cultural identity, representation, and heritage. Central to the exhibition are life-sized and smaller-scale portrait photographs that examine how scale, presence, and visual representation shape the viewer’s relationship to the subject.
Govenar is an interdisciplinary artist, whose subjects inform his medium of expression, whether in photography, poetry, novels, films, musical theatre, and studies that bring new perspectives to historical issues and diverse cultures….
Govenar’s exploration of human-sized portraiture began with a 1987 photograph of a couple dancing at the Longhorn Ballroom, created from a 4x5 color negative made from a Kodachrome slide. That image inspired an extensive body of work focused on recipients of the National Heritage Fellowship, the nation’s highest honor in folk and traditional arts awarded annually by the National Endowment for the Arts. Many of these individuals were also subjects of Govenar’s films, books, radio programs, exhibitions, and catalogues produced through Documentary Arts, the nonprofit organization he founded in 1985.
Throughout the process of creating this series, Govenar encouraged subjects to present themselves as they wished to be seen. Working within a documentary framework, often with the assistance of a photographic assistant and carefully constructed studio lighting environments, his approach remained intentionally open, collaborative, and responsive to the individuality of each subject..."
