A Brooklyn based artist for the last 25 years, he began his photographic endeavors in Buffalo in the 1970’s as a photo-historian. Inspired by Buffalo’s Photo-pictorialists around 1900 when photography first evolved as an art form, and he began to photograph the people in his own world. Then, starting in 1981, he worked for 10 years in commercial photography in New York. Now he devotes his work to artistic and documentary endeavors. Major projects have included portraits of Buffalo’s late Yvar Mikhashoff and his composer friends, Radical Faeries, the Elders of Buffalo’s Gay Community and New York City’s downtown performance artists. He recently showed his traditional photo work in a Jersey City gallery alongside color digital art as an exploration of diverging media.
Statement:
From 1971–1981 Keith Gemerek was teaching at CAUSE School, an un-graded, open classroom, alternative school in Buffalo. He combined teaching photography with the language arts of reading and writing, resulting in dramatic portraits of his students. The portraits, linked with words, contributed to his first exhibition at CEPA Gallery in 1977, which then traveled around the state. This print is from that series. It still amazes him to remember how eager many of the children were to dramatize “sad” for the camera.