Charles Johnstone

Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming solo exhibition by Charles Johnstone, In Search of the Perfect Palm.  The exhibition will run February 22nd through March 28th in the gallery’s atrium space, with an opening reception with the artist on Saturday the 22nd of February, from 5-7pm. 

The exhibition presents Johnstone’s homage to the 19th Century explorer and photographer Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey.  In 1842, Girault de Prangey set out on a three-year expedition to the Eastern Mediterranean equipped with a camera and a newfound knowledge of the Daguerreotype process.  On this journey he came across a palm tree near the Church of Saints Theodore in Athens that would prove to be a subject worthy of his camera.  The view captured by Girault de Prangey in one of photography’s earliest processes was very modern and unusual for its time, depicting a close-up view of the palm’s fronds against the sky.  In 2019, upon seeing this full plate daguerreotype image made by Girault de Prangey in the exhibition, A Monumental Journey held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Johnstone was inspired to search for the perfect palm.   

In Search of the Perfect Palm will feature small-scale direct positive Polaroid prints. These unique Polaroid prints created by Johnstone on expired batches of Polaroid film stock render his selected palms small in scale, and with the intimacy of viewing akin to the solidarity of beholding a Daguerreotype.  In Johnstone’s photographs, the palm tree is held against the same cerulean sky that the artist encountered in Girault de Prangey’s photograph, and rendered with the inherent artifacts and image inconsistencies that are characteristic of the unpredictable nature of expired film, recalling results indicative to early Daguerreotype images.  With this, Johnstone’s work forms a link to the medium’s past, while suggesting the immediacy of the present through the photographer’s quest to capture a fleeting sense of the beauty and symbolism his subject conveys.

Charles Johnstone is a self-taught photographer, whose works feature his immediate surroundings and environments encountered during travel.  His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Berlin. Johnstone’s books and photographs are included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of the City of New York, and the International Center of Photography.  He was the subject of the 2022 documentary, Remnants of Memory, a film that celebrates beauty in the overlooked, anonymous objects we pass every day, in which Johnstone explores the vivid canals and ancient passageways of Venice, Italy in search of a new book project.

For more information or to request press images please contact info@josephbellows.com