Stranahan collection moves to Aspen, Breckenridge
By David Frey
If a picture is worth a thousand words, this column could be a book.
It’s a column about photographs: portraits, landscapes and still lifes. It’s about vision. More than anything, though, it’s about moments – slices of time that existed just long enough for a shutter to open and burn an image onto film in black and white.
It’s about an extraordinary gift of 80 photographs collected by philanthropists George and Patti Stranahan and handed over to Colorado Mountain College.
George Stranahan is an accomplished photographer himself, but these images weren’t taken by him. They’re photos the couple has collected over a lifetime, many of them by some of the most accomplished photographers of the past century.
“It’s like someone taking their passion and saying, ‘Here’s my passion. I’m going to give it to you,’” says Alice Beauchamp, director of CMC’s Center for Excellence in the Arts and curator of the exhibit.
When the Stranahans first announced their intention to give the gift, Beauchamp went to the Stranahans’ home to see the photos with longtime CMC photography instructor Buck Mills. The images were packed away in boxes. Unwrapping them was like unwrapping buried treasure.
Mills “was like a little kid in a candy store,” Beauchamp says. In front of them were images by renowned landscape photographer Ansel Adams; Depression-era documentarian Walker Evans; trailblazing female photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White; crusading Sebastiao Salgado; erotic Robert Mapplethorpe.
Most of the images have been at the CMC gallery inside the college’s district office on Grand Avenue in Glenwood Springs. They’re moving to the Aspen campus with an opening reception there.
But the 80 photographs are too overwhelming for one site at CMC, so a second exhibit has been on display at the Breckenridge campus. The two exhibits will circulate among the campuses for the next couple years, Beauchamp says, and then may make a bigger road trip to college campuses across the country.
The themes of these black-and-white images vary greatly, but they share one thing in common: they capture a moment in time – a glance to the camera, a glance away, a shaft of light – that appeared, then vanished.
It’s hard to choose a favorite. I’ve seen the exhibit three times and my favorite keeps changing. I’m drawn to two from Henri Cartier-Bresson. The French photographer was famous for capturing what he called the “decisive moment,” that instant that gave his photos an emotional punch they would lack if he pushed the trigger just one moment before or after.
In one, a bicycle blurs down a winding French alleyway an instant before disappearing. In another, a girl is about to be swallowed in a whitewashed labyrinth of Greek stairways and doorways. What is it about these photos? Maybe it’s the fleetingness of time.
Lately, I’m in love with Steven Brock’s “Salud Compadre, Peru.” A trio of apparently pickled Peruvian peasants sit alongside a pockmarked wall. They wear rumpled hats and dirty clothes. One holds a walking stick. One holds a tiny cup of who-knows-what. The third raises his fist in a toast.
“Salud!” he seems to say.
I’m not alone in my affection for this photo. More than one visitor has left the gallery raising their fist and shouting “Salud!” Beauchamp says.
There is a democracy in these photographs. These peasants are hanging out with a portrait of artist Frida Kahlo. Below Marilyn Monroe is a Haitian man caught in what seems to be the thralls of a voodoo trance.
There are furtive glances. In Sally Mann’s “Girl on Lap,” a girl caught between youth and adulthood sneaks a furtive glance at the lens. In Louis Stettner’s “Ferry Crossing, Holland,” A couple kiss, framed by the back window of a car, making the woman glancing away in the backseat seem so much lonelier.
In one, poor Russian schoolchildren sit in class. A Depression-era woman bakes biscuits in another. A New Orleans sex worker reclines. A boy scrambles over a fence. A Mississippi couple dances the jitterbug.
One of Beauchamp’s favorites is Paul Strand’s “Tailor’s Apprentice, Luzzura, Italy.” A stone-faced girl, hat in hand, stands by a bare tree. It seems like a barren life.
But, Beauchamp says, her favorites change, too. It’s such a rich collection, how do you choose?
“I’m speechless when I think about it,” she says. “It was a huge personal gift from George and Patti.”
I’m nearly speechless, too, but I can come up with one word in thanks to the Stranahans for making such a rich collection public. Salud!
By the way, the exhibit will run Nov. 5 to Feb. 2 at CMC’s Aspen campus. An opening will be held Nov. 5 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
This article was reprinted from the Oct. 7 edition of the Snowmass Sun.