After curating a piece for Fraction Magazine on Fathers and Sons, I received several e-mails from photographers or curators wanting to share their own work or the work of other photographers working in the same genre. One of those came from Elizabeth Spungen, the Executive Director of The Print Center. Elizabeth wanted to let me know about the work of Judy Gelles, a Philadelphia photographer, who has been photographing her family, and the world that surrounds them, for the past several decades.

Judy has many other interesting series and explorations, some not on her site. Her work explores the our present, past, and future, often using material that is most familiar to her. “Gelles received a MFA degree in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1991. Her work is in major collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Artist Residencies include the MacDowell Colony, the Visual Studies Workshop, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has published three books: When We Were Ten and Florida Family Portrait with the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, and Beach Boxes with Nazraeli Press.”

For thirty years, Judy Gelles has explored her intersecting experiences as feminist, mother and artist. Her work provides social commentary on who we are and how we think. For her series of photographs entitled Family Ties: Three Generations, Gelles has paired family artifacts as a way to reflect upon the passage of time, on how things change or stay the same and on the subtle ways we are taught to be male and female in modern society. Her personal experience is a universal one: we all acquire, collect and keep meaningful objects in order to connect with our culture, our family and our past.

Images from Three Generations

Images from Family Portrait