Floyd Memorial Library in Greenport has extended its major summer photography exhibition, A Portrait of America: Documentary Photography at 250 Years, through Sunday, Sept. 6, giving visitors additional time to see a sweeping collection that brings together the work of 21 photographers, many of them based on Long Island and the North Fork.
Curated by the library’s art exhibits curator, Sally Grant, the exhibition was organized to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the United States and uses documentary photography to examine American life from the 1940s to the present.
The show begins close to home, with images of Greenport and Long Island, before moving across the country and through decades of American life. Its subjects range from New York City streets and Native American communities to the American West, industrial landscapes, beach towns, protests and parades.
But the exhibition also provides a significant showcase for photographers working in and around the North Fork today.
Local photographers featured
Greenport photographer Jeremy Garretson is represented both in the main exhibition and upstairs with his Faces of Greenport series, which turns the documentary lens directly on the people of the village. One of Garretson’s photographs, American Girl, from 2023, was featured prominently in the library’s July-August curator’s notes alongside Thomas Halaczinsky’s Fists Raised Forever, Women’s March, from 2019.
Other participating photographers with local or Long Island connections include Paul Henry, Jeremy Dennis, David Benthal, Megan Barron, Cara Galowitz, Michael Drakopoulos, Rosario Rodriguez, Bill Stamatis and Linda K Alpern, among others. Photographer Estefany Molina collaborated with North Fork farmer and poet Peter Treiber Jr. on a project included in the exhibition.
Silver gelatin photograph. Collection of Elizabeth Talerman.
The show extends beyond the library’s main gallery. Photographs by Ian Wile document the quintessential American cross-country road trip, while study rooms have been staged as photographers’ studios to feature work by longtime professionals Dennis Chalkin and Anders Goldfarb.
The exhibition also places those contemporary photographers alongside work by two noted 20th-century photographers: Leonard McCombe, who died in 2015, and Herbert Talerman, who died in 1992. Their families loaned several photographs for the show, including McCombe images from the 1940s depicting the American cowboy and the Navajo Nation and Talerman photographs of New York City.
Together, the photographs portray Americans across differences of age, race, ethnicity and economic circumstance — at work and at leisure, in cities and small towns, amid expansive landscapes and abandoned buildings.
Grant describes the collection not as a definitive picture of the country, but as one portrait among many. The exhibition, she writes, documents “a country of parades and protests; of epic landscapes and small, run-down towns; of glitz and glamour and everyday life; and of hopes and dreams, toil and disappointment.”
Archival pigment print on Canson Infinity Rag Photographique.
That approach is reflected in the exhibition’s invocation of two giants of documentary photography. Dorothea Lange once cautioned that “a documentary photograph is not a factual photograph,” while Robert Frank observed that truth lies somewhere between the documentary and the fictional.
The result is less an attempt to define America at 250 than to explore it through the individual eyes of photographers — including a substantial group documenting the people, places and moments around them on Long Island today.
Many of the works in the exhibition are available for sale. A Portrait of America: Documentary Photography at 250 Years will remain on view at Floyd Memorial Library in Greenport through Sunday, Sept. 6.
