Misty Keasler first came to national attention via her series on Guatemalan Dumps in 2003. Featured in the gallery will be a related series shedding light on Manila garbage dumps and the people who call the dumps their home, including Payatas, the site of a tragedy killing over 200 people in 2000. Photographed in 2006, this important series will be featured in an upcoming issue of Harper's.
Keasler graduated from Columbia College Chicago (Chicago, IL) with her bachelor's degree in 2001. In 2003, Keasler was the winner of the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize for documentary photography, one of Photo District News's 30 most promising young photographers, and published in the Center for Documentary Studies's 25 Under 25. The release of her first monograph, Love Hotels, by Chronicle Books this fall will be followed by a solo museum show at the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, IL). She has shown at Julie Saul Gallery (New York, NY), Women & Their Work (Austin, TX), and Photographs Do Not Bend (Dallas, TX).
My time in orphanages, Chinese Amusement Parks, impoverished garbage dump dwellings, and even in Japanese Love Hotels has resulted in work about public and private space. Generally we are oblivious to most of the anomalies that differentiate culture, especially our own. The spaces we inhabit and the general areas in which we dwell speak volumes about our lives, values, and our culture. This especially becomes apparent in places where people don't have enough money to redecorate on a whim. What awakens us is contrast.
In many of these photographs the environments are stronger than the people. The people are transitory.
Jean Caslin was hired as Assistant Director of the PRC in 1979 and worked with Directors Chris Enos and Stan Trecker. Nine years later, she left to become the Executive Director of Houston Center for Photography (Houston, TX). At HCP, Caslin was responsible for creating over 275 exhibitions during her 17-year tenure. With a special interest and expertise in strategic planning and organizational development, HCP was awarded numerous national and regional grants to support strategic, programmatic and capital campaign initiatives, including grants from the Institute of Museum & Library Services, National Endowment for the Arts, Texas Commission on the Arts, Cultural Arts Council of Houston and Harris County, The Houston Endowment and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Caslin holds a BA in English Language & Literature and Art History from Boston University, (where she studied with Carl Chiarenza) and an MA in Art History from Stanford University. During her time in visual arts management, she taught history of photography courses at five colleges and universities in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Texas. She was a contributing editor and writer for PRC's VIEWS: A New England Journal of Photography and HCP's SPOT magazine. She has written many articles and was co-author with D. Clarke Evans of Building a Photographic Library, a bibliography of photographic books, published by Texas Photographic Society in 2001. In 2005, she established a consulting business for the arts and culture, Caslin Gregory & Associates. The firm offers career coaching services for visual artists and organizational development/strategic planning services for organizations. She is also an independent curator, writer, and exhibiting photographer.
