Steve Geer: Stories To Be Written

Virtual Converstion with the Artist: Thursday, October 21, 2021, 7 p.m. To register please visit https://perspectivegallery.org/oct-21

In his series “Stories To Be Written,” objects discovered by chance by walking the sidewalks of Chicago are shown in their found context – the ground on which they rest and the towering environment around them. Their unwritten stories are like latent images waiting to be developed with the experience and personal bias of the viewer.
 
Each image was made by combining two photographs taken from one spot, the place where the object was found. At each location Steve Geer has chosen to look vertically straight-up and then straight-down. He then combined the images in the digital darkroom. Somehow our brains are able to disentangle these composite views and interpret the results. The Cubist painters understood our ability to do this when they constructed canvasses that showed multiple views of a subject. The merged up-down images in the present series can be thought of as the inverse of these Cubist paintings. Instead of looking at a fixed point from multiple directions we are looking outwards from a fixed point in two directions. According to Geer, "The merged up-down images are perhaps relatively easy for us to interpret because we have strong expectations for what things should be up and what should be on the ground, and in sorting this out we begin to write our version of the unwritten story."
 
Steve grew up in England where photography and natural science were the passions of his youth.  After completing studies in Physics at Liverpool University, Geer went on to work as an experimental physicist in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1987 he moved to the U.S. to teach Physics at Harvard University. His scientific career eventually brought him to Chicago to work at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. It was in Chicagoland, at the time of the digital revolution, that Steve’s photography really took off when he began selling stock images. In 2015, Steve joined Perspective Group and Photography Gallery in Evanston, Illinois where he is currently on the gallery’s Board of Directors.
 
In recent years, Geer [www.stevegeer.com] has had his work featured in photography magazines, published in books and exhibited in galleries in the United States and Europe. His previous featured exhibitions at the Perspective Gallery have been: Chicago through the Looking Glass (February 2016), From the Ground Up (April 2017), One-sixth of a Second (February 2018), Discarded (June 2019), and River Ice (February 2020). Steve has recently been awarded with a Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society. Steve currently lives in Chicago with his wife, Liz, who is also a Fermilab scientist.
 
About Perspective Gallery
Founded in 2010, Perspective Group and Photography Gallery is a not-for-profit, community-oriented cooperative whose purpose is to promote fine art photography. In addition to monthly group and featured artists exhibitions, the gallery features a guest speaker lecture series, monthly artist talks, an annual national juried exhibition, an annual invitational show, an annual Vicinity exhibition, and an annual juried show for Chicago-area high school students.