Aurora PhotoCenter officially launches this summer, joining Indianapolis’s thriving art scene with an inaugural community-focused workshop and exhibition by renowned tintype artist Keliy Anderson-Staley.
Founded by local artist-photographers, Adam Reynolds, Craig McCormick, and Mary Goodwin, Aurora serves as a creative bridge between artists and the greater photographic community with a regional, national, and international perspective. Aurora will be a place where artists meet, create, share work, and find inspiration.
In its first year, Aurora will focus on awareness of photography as a medium for art and social expression. By hosting partnerships and pop-up-style events, Aurora will work to build a community in central Indiana around the medium of photography through exhibits, conversations, and workshops. As Aurora grows and receives non-profit status, it will establish a dedicated gallery space, along with darkroom and studio facilities for both community education and working artists.
“Photography was once a medium permanently documenting history, family, and places. Today it is a momentary medium ruled by innuendo,” says Craig McCormick, Aurora co-founder. “Through Aurora, we hope to explore how photography becomes art in fast and slow times.”
Partnering with Big Car Collaborative in the Garfield Park neighborhood, Aurora’s inaugural event will feature Anderson-Staley’s ongoing tintype portrait series, [hyphen] American. Based out of Houston, TX, Anderson-Staley has spent the past decade travel- ing the country with a portable 19th century tintype studio capturing a typological portrait survey of the human faces that make up today’s America. Her next stop is Indianapolis, where she will be holding a tintype workshop and portrait sessions open to the community, followed by a curated exhibition of her tintype portraits from Indianapolis and beyond.
Tintype photography was patented in the United States in 1856 and is the most accessible form of wet-plate collodion photogra- phy. Tintypes are the primary photographic medium of the American Civil War and the Old West. Unlike the instantaneous digital selfie of today, a tintype portrait is an intimate collaboration between both the photographer and the sitter, resulting in a one-of-a- kind portrait and experience.
“Keliy’s project is an open invitation for Indianapolis to come together in a collective portrait of our city,” says Aurora co-founder Mary Goodwin. “It gives us a chance to re-examine what it means to be ‘American’ today.”
[hyphen] American will be on display in the Tube Factory’s Efroymson Gallery July 5-26 with an opening reception on July 5. Keliy Anderson-Staley will be in Indianapolis June 13-16 making tintype portraits. She will host a workshop on tintypes on June 15.