[Essay] Finding Meaning Within: The Photography of John Pinderhughes

A star of the New York art world, John Pinderhughes (b. 1946) has established himself over the past half-century as the ultimate observer and narrator of the communities all around him. This Fall, the Polk Museum of Art at Florida Southern College presents an original, extraordinary retrospective exhibition, years in the making, showcasing Pinderhughes’ broad reportorial eye and his ability to find meaning and value in everything — and every person — he photographs. Indeed, through Pinderhughes’ powerful camera lens, he makes clear that every human subject and every still life object has a story worth telling.

Pinderhughes was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Alabama and New Jersey, but New York City has been home to his commercial and fine art studio for decades. As one of a fartoo-limited number of respected, in-demand African-American photographers today, Pinderhughes has gained a reputation as an award-winning professional artist, with major business clients that include Sony, BMW, Chase Bank, and Publix Supermarkets, to name a few. Simultaneous with his commercial successes, Pinderhughes has been celebrated widely as an artist capable of exploring identity and memory while also highlighting the beautiful, unique qualities of the photographic medium itself. He is a longtime member of Kamoinge, a collective of Black artists formed in the 1960s to assist photographers in getting noticed in the art world. And Pinderhughes is a perfect example of the value of that mission: just to look at his work leaves little doubt as to why he is sought out by Fortune 500 companies as well as galleries and museums like ours.

Per the title of this exhibition — Finding Meaning Within — a Pinderhughes photograph is anything but superficial and its subject anything but random. Each viewer can quickly sense that there is much more meaning within each image than first ameets the eye. When we look at the sitters presented in Pinderhughes’ acclaimed Harlem Portraits series, we want to know not merely who they are but also what they may have seen in their lives. We are invited both to decipher their emotions and to envision what it was about these sitters, specifically, that captured the photographer’s attention and his observational lens.

Likewise, even Pinderhughes’ most deceptively simple compositions — a lone animal bone set against a black backdrop, an colorful abstracted view of a flower — beg for the viewer to imagine a backstory behind them. Pinderhughes intends it this way. In fact, by naming his bone-based series Burnt Offerings and his abstractions Quiet Scripture, the artist indicates that these are designed as much more than just descriptive works. They carry clear import for the artist and push each of us as viewers, in turn, to make our own associations based on our own identities, experiences, and memories.

Pinderhughes is not a documentary photographer; just as with the commercial photography for which he has become known, in his personal photographic work he carefully selects and stages his subjects — be they residents of Upper Manhattan, the young sitter who forms the narrative through-line of his powerful Pretty for a Black Girl, or leftovers from a family meal. If considered carefully, everything, every portrait, every overlooked object carries with it a trace of memory or meaning for someone, Pinderhughes seems to say. Finding Meaning Within is an exhibition about the search for and realization of those memories and the identities we build upon them.

By by H. Alexander Rich, Ph.D., Executive Director and Chief Curator

Finding Meaning Within: The Photography of John Pinderhughes will be on view November 13, 2021 to February 24, 2022 in Gallery II.