Steven Edson

Steven Edson

December 12th, 2024 – February 7th, 2025

 

The interplay between memory and photography directs us towards deeper insights about how we remember and interpret our experiences. The work of Steven Edson operates similarly to a daydream. Images of sanguine moments, rich color palettes, and diverse subject matters are familiar yet simultaneously fantastical. Carefully curated, this exhibition comes from Edson’s film photography archives spanning from 1980 – 2000. What was discovered, subconsciously, is a narrative that may lead the audience to consider commonalities that we share with our neighbors across the world and throughout history concerning aesthetic values, habits, the notion of curiosity, and the phenomenon of the “liminal”.

 

Throughout these two decades, the images in this exhibition were taken by Edson while both in his home of the Greater Boston area as well as while traveling across the US and abroad. From New York City to Vermont, Miami to Jamaica, Mexico to Spain and Paris, Edson’s imagery excavates the earth of our memory that is riddled with pleasant recollections, periods of stress, the mundane, and everything in between.

When looking back at our lives and the memories we have made, we tend to look at them with moments of intensity or romanticized passion, much like how the saturation and color of Edson’s photographs evoke the feelings of a fanciful universe of their own. Each of Edson’s images serve as a vignette that reveals small stories of how we may all do this unintentionally.

 

This collection of imagery is wildly captivating, yet has an essence of the stunningly familiar. Edson’s style has the power to cause the viewer to feel immediately connected. While masterfully created, the images ooze a presentation of effortlessness that causes one to wonder if they were taken from a universal scrapbook we didn’t know we all had. This is done while concurrently whisking one away into what feels like a parallel universe of the past that almost directly mirrors our own.

 

 

 

Artist Statement

 

In my photography, I describe the complexity and vastness of people, land, and objects within constantly changing conditions. For these brief moments, time stands still for eternity. The photograph, constrained within the edges of the frame, offers the viewer the ability to explore and make sense of our shared sense of place from my very specific point of view. My curiosity about context and narratives being true and fabricated simultaneously has inspired me to continue exploring within what I refer to as “street photography”. I never know what to expect, so it leaves room for the unexpected to occur while creating a story about the activities people engage in. Created between the decades of the 1980s through 2000, these photographs illustrate my love of observation, perspective and at times, the whimsical humor that these moments offered.

Biography

 

Steven Edson started photographing in the early 1970’s, shooting mostly black and white documentary photography. After attending Goddard College in Vermont, he graduated with a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and went went on to become a successful commercial freelance photographer, living in the Boston area while working on assignments for regional, national and international clients. He currently shows his fine art / documentary photography in solo and group shows while his photographs are collected in both private and corporate collections.

 

Mr. Edson has been committed to working within the photographic medium on a daily basis for the past forty years. His photographs have been widely published in multiple web and print journals internationally and he has won numerous  awards for his fine art photography. Steve’s color film photographs from the 1980s-2000 show a point of view and appreciation of the people, places and things in which he focused his lens upon. These images speak to his sense of humor, appreciation for social commentary and a general interest in observing and the visual interactions of people, with the landscape, and objects. 

 

Although initially created during the 1980s-2000, these photographs have only recently been re-discovered. From tens of thousands of 35mm color slide film made during this period, they have only been recently edited, scanned and finalized into a current portfolio of work to be shared with a new audience. 

Edson Family Pic