Mixed Media
In her fine-art photography, artist Julie Graber captures intimate, shared moments between people; images of family life; and evocative portraits of children, travel, and other subjects. She explores themes of domesticity, childhood, memory, and time in photographs tinged with nostalgia. Graber, trained as an editorial photographer, is a former staff photographer at The Santa Fe New Mexican and is now based in Seattle. Her editorial work has included photo essays on Sierra Leone following the African nation’s decade-long civil war, as well as documentation of traveling circuses and her various road trips through the United States. A show of Graber’s recent color transfers on watercolor paper called A Place I Lived and People I See, based on a year spent in and around the area of Avignon, France, opens at Counter Culture Café (930 Baca St.) on Friday, July 31. “They are about finding home in an unfamiliar place, about observation and personal resilience,” Gaber writes in a statement about the works. There is no reception for A Place I Lived and People I See; the show remains on view through Aug. 28.
“My work focuses on people,” Graber writes on her website www.juliegraber.com. “I began photographing in the late 1980s as a way to discover neighborhoods and cultures different from my own. I wander with my camera, talking to strangers, noticing the beauty in the everyday, and am amazed at the exotic differences and the subtle similarities that coexist.” For information call 505-995-1105. — Michael Abatemarco