September 22, 2006 - November 11, 2006

From September 22, 2006 through November 11, 2006, Gallery 339 is pleased to present The Regulars, an exhibition by local photographer, Sarah Stolfa.  The show will open the evening of Thursday, September 21^st with a reception from 6:00 – 8:00 pm.  

Sarah Stolfa envisions the boundaries of collective experience and isolation in her photographic series, The Regulars.  Shot while bartending at McGlinchey’s, one of Philadelphia’s oldest taverns, these striking portraits resonate with the searching and loneliness of the urban bar experience.  Yet in these images, Stolfa has found the dignity and individuality of her subjects.  Composed with consistency of viewpoint and complexity of perspective, these portraits of the bar’s regulars blend the unusual state of detachment and intimacy found in a local bar.

Stolfa leaves McGlinchey’s this summer to begin a graduate program in photography at Yale University, and thereby bring the series to a close.  The exhibition coincides with the completion of the project and is the first comprehensive exhibition for this body of work.. The Regulars began as a familiar subject for Stolfa.  For several years, she had been a bartender and performed in bars with the rock band Delta 72.  Yet the ease and comfort Stolfa felt in the bar, and that her subjects felt with her, helped Stolfa’s work to significantly transcend the ordinary.  She has incisively captured the search for community and contact among a diverse group of people.  In so doing, Stolfa has created both a set of distinct and affecting portraits and a remarkable catalogue of Americans at the beginning of the 21^st century.

Stolfa’s achievement with the series has received an impressive level of recognition over the past two years.  In 2004, Stolfa won The New York Times Photography Contest for College Students and several of the early portraits were reproduced in The New York Times Magazine.  In 2006, Stolfa was included in the Second Woodmere Triennial of Contemporary Photography, alongside Arnold Newman, Naomi Savage, David Graham, and other well-known photographers.  She has won the Noah Addis Photojournalism Award and an award for Artistic Excellence in the Perkins Center Photography Competition.  She is a recent graduate of Drexel University and has had a solo exhibition at the Pearlstein Gallery at Drexel in 2004.  Stolfa is currently working on a book project related to The Regulars series and will be attending Yale University’s MFA program in fall 2006.

When reviewing Stolfa’s work in the Second Woodmere Triennial of Contemporary Photography exhibition, Jim Weaver of Art Matters wrote, “Part catalogue, part sociological cross-section, part environmental portrait … Ms. Stolfa’s series encompasses and fuses multiple threads of photographic tradition into a perceptive and compelling glimpse of contemporary life.”  Stolfa’s work can been seen in the context of August Sander’s documentary portraits of German society as well as Rineke Dijkstra’s controlled portraits of teenagers on beaches around the world.  By isolating the subject and maintaining a consistent background, the individual photographed is free to dominate the viewer’s consciousness.  With a nod to Andres Serrano’s America series and Thomas Ruff’s portraits of young Germans, Stolfa’s subjects are “everyday Joe’s” who become elevated and revealed by the image-making process itself.  The power of the portrait is both collective and personal in Stolfa’s distinctive series focused on real people, in real time, in a real place.

Gallery 339, a fine art photography gallery, is open Tuesday – Saturday 10:00 am – 6:00 pm and Sunday and Monday by appointment.  The gallery is located on the Northeast corner of 21^st and Pine streets in Center City Philadelphia.