Long Light is the first museum survey, hosted by Philadelphia Museum of Art, devoted to American photographer David Lebe. It examines his artistic range and experimentation over five decades, including his powerful representations of gay experience and living with AIDS. The exhibition comprises approximately 145 photographs created from 1969 to the present, drawn primarily from the museum’s collection.
Lebe (born New York City, 1948) arrived in Philadelphia as a student in 1966 and stayed for more than 25 years. His body of work is rooted in elementary approaches to photography, including pinhole pictures (using a camera but no lens); photograms (using no camera at all); and light drawings (using a conventional camera and long exposures). This simplistic approachallowed him to treat photographs as events in time rather than frozen moments. Additionally, he involved himself in pictures, interacted collaboratively with models, rearranged natural objects into fantastical scenes, and painted prints with watercolor.
More recently, Lebe’s art included digital photography, using it as a challenging process, revisiting earlier series to make different prints (a recurring pattern throughout his career) and exploring its creative limits in new work about landscape, still life, and shadows.
Lebe came out as a gay man in the 1970s and was among the first generation of queer artists who explored homosexuality in their work. With the onset of the AIDS crisis and then his own diagnosis in 1988, his art became increasingly focused on gay experience. Through the 1990s he produced diverse series about AIDS that are by turns contemplative, humorous, and confrontational, but always return to a core theme, human touch and exchange.
