THE NEW AMERICANS
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© Jill Enfield
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After 30+ years in New York City, Jill Enfield found that her lower Manhattan neighborhood was under constant change, culturally and commercially, as immigrants arrived to establish new lives and identities as “Americans.” The daughter of a German Holocaust survivor who came to the United States in 1939 to escape Nazi persecution, Enfield was intrigued by the common threads in all immigrant stories.
“I well remember frequently hearing questionable remarks about my father’s German ancestry, which inspired me to explore the challenges that immigrants face today.” – Jill Enfield For a multitude of reasons - political asylum, religious freedom, economic opportunity, family duty, basic survival or big dreams - millions of people still immigrate to the United States. |
Enfield initiated the New Americans project to explore the immigrant experience, and document her changing neighborhood. In this exhibition, Jill Enfield combines 19th century wet collodion with digital scanning and 21st century printing as she fuses elements of the old and the new to create alchemical portraits that reflect both historic technique and the reality of contemporary existence. Jill Enfield’s chose to create these images using wet-plate collodion, a 150 year-old photographic technique fraught with difficulty and uncertain outcome, reinforces the precarious nature of immigration itself.
Number of Photographs: approx 45
Rental fee: TBA
Rental fee: TBA