Nadine Boughton

The Annenberg Center for Photography's IRIS Nights will be featuring a lecture with Nadine Boughton on Thursday evening, April 19th in Los Angeles. Tickets are available here at noon today, Pacific Standard Time, and tomorrow at 9:30am. The lecture accompanies the exhibition, Digital Darkroom that takes a look at the intersection of art and technology. Nadine grew up in Rochester, New York, under the shadow of George Eastman’s Kodak Tower. She studied photography with Garry Winogrand, and at Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY, and Lesley University Seminars, Cambridge, MA. She currently lives in Gloucester, MA where she teaches photography, collage and creative writing.

Nadine's unique approach to image making has garnered her recognition as one of the Top 50 portfolios in the Critical Mass 2011 competition, Photolucida, and her collages will be exhibited at Photo Center Northwest, Seattle, WA, Newspace Center for Photography, Portland, OR and RayKo Photo Center, San Francisco, CA. Her work has been exhibited at the Davis Orton Gallery, Hudson, NY, the Boston Drawing Project/Carroll & Sons Gallery, Panopticon Gallery, Bromfield Gallery, Photographic Resource Center, Griffin Museum of Photography, Danforth Museum of Art, in the Boston area. Her work was featured in Plates to Pixels on-line gallery.





TRUE ADVENTURES IN BETTER HOMES: When I recently discovered men’s adventure magazines of the 1950’s and early 1960’s at a flea market, I found them shocking, funny, ambiguously rich artifacts of popular culture. Seeing them as narratives from the collective psyche, I wondered how they would speak in an environment of orderly homes with sunny patios depicted in women’s magazines of the same era. This portfolio reveals a collision of two worlds: men’s adventure magazines or “sweats” meets Better Homes and Gardens.




These photocollages are set against the backdrop of the McCarthy era, advertising, sexual repression, WWII and the Korean War. The cool, insular world of mid-century modern living glossed over all darkness, which the heroic male fought off in every corner.





My intention is to show how the inner psyche reflects the culture at large. I am drawn to the tension of opposites: inner and outer spaces, wildness and domesticity, the sweat and the cool.





With a background in psychology, I am always interested in what lies beneath appearances. The predator theme so present in the “true” adventures led me to explore “who” or “what” is breaking through. Whether the metaphor is that of bats or whales, this “other” carries not only our deepest fears but our deepest desires. We meet ourselves.