Photography Exhibition of Works by John Ranard (1952-2008)
A Gathering of the Tribes Gallery in East Village, NYC, will be holding an exhibition of works of the late documentary photographer, John Ranard, with an opening reception on September 6. Ranard’s work is collected by the Brooklyn Museum, the Andrei Sakharov Museum in Moscow, the University of Louisville Fine Print Archives, and the well-known collection of the musician Graham Nash. Ranard passed away in New York City in May of this year of liver cancer.
Ranard is known particularly for his portfolio on boxing, The Brutal Aesthetic, his documentary work on the collapse of the Soviet Empire, and his photographic investigations of the Russian prison system and the epidemic of AIDS in Russia. Portions of The Brutal Aesthetic were published in the book On Boxing in 1987, a collaboration with Joyce Carol Oates and a classic of the genre which remains in print. Ranard’s portfolios on the crumbling of the Soviet Union appeared in Granta magazine and the Ontario Review, and his photographs on AIDS in Russia appeared in a photo essay in The New York Times in 1997 which won First Place for Issue Reporting Picture Story by the National Photographers’ Association for that year. His work on AIDS in Russia was supported by the Soros Open Society Institute, AIDS Foundation East-West, and Médècins Sans Frontières.
According to the family, Ranard left an oeuvre of numerous other portfolios on topics he regularly investigated and interpreted, in his characteristically edgy, and sometimes nuanced, black-and-white style: East Village life in New York City; themes in Louisville, Kentucky, a second home; sports and spectacle in America in the early 1980s; and a much lesser-known portfolio on weddings, I Do.
In an obituary in The Washington Post, Matt Schudel quoted Joyce Carol Oates on Ranard’s photographs, “They’re very poetic. They’re the highest kind of journalism, where it passes into art.” In an article published in The Villager, Q. Sakamaki, a Japanese ex-pat photographer in America, said of Ranard, “He’s a real, great photographer…very talented, especially his composition. If he is lucky, he could have been one of the best photographers in the world–in the opinion of photographers.”
John Penley, an East Village activist, said, “He was very much the classic photojournalist. He would concentrate on one subject—he didn’t just pick one story and then jump to another. He really dedicated his life to that.”
A broad spectrum of Ranard’s work will be showing at the Tribes Gallery, on view from September 4-30, with the opening reception on September 6, 7-10 PM.
On September 6 the Ranard family will be holding a Memorial Service for John, at St. Marks Church in-the-Bowery at 5 PM (131 East Tenth Street at Second Avenue), where a slide show will be presented of some 80 of Ranard’s iconic works. Friends and media are invited to attend. Please RSVP merry.esp@verizon.net if you can.