Social Fabric

Maurene Cooper and Eric Kunsman

August 22 – October 21, 2022
Artist Talk: September 22 @12:30 in person and on zoom

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Merion Hall Gallery presents Social Fabric, a photography exhibition featuring Helen Maurene Cooper’s The Caregivers and Eric Kunsman’s Before Noon; two photography projects that explore lives and relationships that bond communities. Based in Philadelphia, PA and Rochester, NY respectively, the artists share their experiences living in neighborhoods that bring people together and face challenges as one.

Helen Maurene Cooper’s The Caregivers is an ongoing social document of the photographer’s neighbors exploring caregiving among queer and heteronormative families during and after a time of self-isolation. The project began as a way for Cooper to meet and interact with her neighbors during the COVID-19 lockdown. After having moved back to Philadelphia from Chicago, Cooper found that she had not gotten to know her neighbors despite how densely populated her neighborhood is. During quarantine in March 2020, she saw an opportunity to meet these people by setting up her camera outside her home studio offering portraits to anyone willing to collaborate. By nature of many Philadelphians and because of the isolating conditions of the pandemic, people who passed her were “outgoing, forward, and nosy” enough to approach her and ask about the project.

Using an 8×10 camera and a photographic wet-plate collodion process, Cooper took a series of portraits for each couple or family that worked with her. During photography sessions, Cooper bonded with her community through discussions of parenting, caring for aging family members, and the difficulties of doing all this and more through a pandemic. From the start of COVID-19, the physical and mental demands for caretakers, especially women, became more extreme than they previously were. Through stories of nurturing and vulnerability from the people that Cooper photographed during this challenging time, the shared human experience of caretaking is revealed.

For the future of this project, Cooper hopes to rephotograph her neighbors over the years as a means to share what caretaking has been like for families both during and after COVID-19.

Eric Kunsman’s Before Noon captures the hopefulness found within communities living in areas with high poverty rates. Photographing people before the day has set in, as the title suggests, Kunsman finds how a fresh morning can bring positivity no matter what the situation.

Before Noon is a project stemming from his previous work, Felicific Calculus, which looked at the socioeconomic position of Rochester, New York and aimed to confute the negative stereotypes placed on it. In this new collection, Kunsman focuses on the people of Rochester and other poverty-stricken cities with a similar goal. Living and working in the city himself, the photographer approached neighbors he’s known for years as well as people he’s never talked to in hopes of showing how his community is happier than people make them out to be.

Hearing how people talk down about poor cities without having ever lived in one struck a chord with Kunsman. He describes how truly optimistic his neighbors can be and how their sense of community is invaluable. “Some of these people are a whole lot happier than the well-off neighbors I had in the suburbs,” he says. Whether it’s fixing someone’s broken down car or setting up a memorial for a lost one, these people look out for one another and find hope in unexpected ways.

Dee Feuda ’25, Gallery Exhibition Research Assistant

 

Maurene Cooper – “The Caregivers”

Helen Maurene Cooper, from the Caregivers,
Bea with her Dads, Sauce and Daniel, Wet plate collodion process (ambrotype on clear glass) one- of- a- kind image,
(left August 2020, right July 2022).

The Caregivers addresses the emotional and physical labor of parenthood and romantic partnership in my community during a global pandemic.

Using an 8×10 camera, the wet plate collodion process (ambrotypes) and the sidewalk in front of my home studio, I make portraits in public space of families and lovers.

Over a series of multiple sessions, I collaborate my subjects to tell intimate stories of how they nurture, support and protect each other. Through gesture, expression, the placement of bodies and the manipulation of perspective, I depict a wide range of queer and heteronormative families who live within walking distance of my front stoop. I use these portraits as a means to explorer caregiving not as a given role for a women but with the context of queer and feminist thought that sees this labor as a radical act.

The work weaves together a narrative of world-building, using public space and the politics of family and intimacy during a period of self-isolation.

 

Eric Kunsman – “Before Noon”

Boom Car Pride, 15”x20”, Archival Pigment Print, 2022

Before Noon is a new series that explores the power of hopefulness of the people in cities with extremely high poverty rates, the idea is that every individual has the whole day ahead of them before noon and a clean slate prior to the weight of the world setting in on any given day. Often, the weight of the world can take away the smiles one may have in the morning or lead to individuals relying on other means to help forget about that weight and feel carefree.

I want to show each individual’s hope, and community rather than the blight and misfortune many photographers focus on when not engaging with one’s surroundings. Yes, some photographs show the deterioration of the cities I am photographing, but those images do not contain individuals. Those images set the tone of the perseverance of the individuals living in these cities throughout the United States.

Roberto, 15”x20”, Archival Pigment Print, 2021