Sheffer Gallery

October 8 through December 15

Reception and Artist Talk: Wednesday, October 15, 6-8 pm, in the Trefz Forum; click here for more information.
(Reception kicks off at 6 pm, followed by an artist talk with guest curator and photographer Arthur Nager at 7 pm.)

About the Exhibit

Every Picture Tells a Story includes photographs from The Westport Public Art Collections selected to coordinate with StoryFest 2025 and to highlight the work of the many creative photographers represented in the collection. Curator and photographer Arthur Nager worked with Carole Erger-Fass, exhibit curator of The Westport Library, and members of the Westport Public Art Collections to identify photographs that demonstrated diverse creative and technological approaches to the medium. The work on display includes portraits, landscape studies, historical, documentary, and abstract imagery in black and white and color.

The exhibit features internationally renowned photographers Philippe Halsman, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Eliot Porter, and Lucia Nebel White; along with wonderful creative imagery from Westport photographers including Larry Silver and David Kalman, who focused on the town and region; photojournalists Spencer Platt and Lynsey Addario, among others.

Nager will also be leading a three-part Verso University workshop, Visual Storytelling: Develop Your Photographic Vision, in conjunction with his exhibit and with StoryFest 2025.

About the Curator

Throughout a 50-year career as an artist and photo educator, Arthur Nager has focused on documenting the social landscape — the people, structures and places that reflect the character of where and how we live. His goal has been to capture the details of our evolving culture to convey what is timeless and constant in our lives. His work incorporates chance, circumstance, and premonition with the element of irony.

“I am driven by curiosity to capture how people, and the visual elements that surround us are overlooked and taken for granted but key to understanding the culture in which we live.”

Nager’s work is part of educational and museum collections including The International Museum of Photography at The George Eastman House, The South Street Seaport Museum, the Museum of Art, Santa Cruz, Kennebunk Museum, the Westport Public Art Collections, and the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury. His recent exhibit focusing on the towns of the Naugatuck Valley took place at the Mattatuck Museum earlier this year.

“One photographer that has masterfully articulated this relationship for over fifty years is Arthur Nager.  With a combination of keen observation, humor, and an extraordinary sense of composition, his personal renditions of the human condition places him firmly in the pantheon of photographers such as Gary Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank, Tony Ray Jones, Harry Callahan, and Joel Sternfeld. Nager brings to the practice a uniquely personal take on what it means to be alive in all its complexities and he does so with an astonishing blend of wit, humanity, and vision.”

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Read Rupert Jenkins interview highlight the series Divine Light Photographs on The Colorado Photo History Blog.

“A masterwork of place-specific art history and a master class in how the story of the second half of the twentieth century can be discovered in the details of cultural activity—in this case, photography in Colorado. Judicious and deeply researched, the book fills in the blanks about the 1951 Aspen photography conference, an unprecedented gathering of photography luminaries, about the Center for the Eye, Cherie Hiser’s legendary but little understood summer workshop, and much else. In addition, Rupert Jenkins brings overdue recognition to the accomplishments of photographers Myron Wood and Burnis McCloud, galleryist Hal Gould, and artist-teachers Barbara Jo Revelle and Ellen Manchester, among many others. The wide selection of photographs accompanying Jenkins’s text is icing on the cake.”
—Andy Grundberg, George Washington University, author of How Photography Became Contemporary Art