Barbara Vaughn: Synthesis July 30-September 5, 2016

"Barbara Vaughn combines her love of water and an appetite for abstraction, and distills an inventive formula that 'springs from an unexpected confluence of nature and the man-made world…' For this artist, inspiration comes from the magic of harnessing water's inherent ability to mirror and transform the appearance of objects in and around it. Vaughn captures the reflective visual chemistry of the sun, sky and wind through a cameras lens at the decisive moment, which results in amazing abstract compositions whose original sources are barely recognizable, but memorably beautiful in their simplicity and ingenuity." - Bruce Helander, Huffington Post

Barbara Vaughn is a fine-art photographer based in San Francisco and New York City. After decades of creating traditional black-and-white representational imagery, she embarked on a radically new trajectory inspired by Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. Her current series of work documents water - more precisely reflections of commons scenes found in ports, marinas, and canals around the world. However, the subject matter of the photographs is rendered unrecognizable by the water’s distorting undulation, and the camera’s ability to freeze the distortion in a split second. The resulting un-manipulated images challenge the viewer to recreate the scene and engage our power of imagination.

Vaughn's earlier artwork, an extensive series of black-and-white series of nudes, explored the relationship between the human form and forms in nature, in which she choreographed her subjects to contrast with, or conform to each different environment. As a successful NYC portrait photographer in her earlier career, she photographed many luminaries in the arts, entertainment, and business realms. Her work has been published in numerous books including Nerve: The New Nude (Chronicle), Tory Burch: In Color (Abrams), Victoria Hagan: Interior Portraits (Rizzoli), Kate Spade: Places to Go, People to See (Abrams), In the Spirit of the Hamptons (Assouline), as well as magazines including American Art Collector, Art in America, Time, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Town & Country, Paris Match, Allure, and Marie Claire. Her images have been featured in print advertising campaigns for Kodak and Perrier-Jouet.

Vaughn graduated from Princeton University and attended the International Center of Photography in NYC, in addition to other photography programs. She is represented by several galleries in the US and her artwork is in numerous noteworthy private collections.

Print information for Barbara Vaughn:
All work archival pigment prints, editions of 5 in dimensions shown plus 2 artist proofs in variable sizes.