Images © Doug DuBois
Doug DuBois
Photo © Keily Anderson Stayley
Artist's Talk: Doug DuBois
My Last Day At Seventeen
Saturday, June 18, 2016 at 11:00am
The Paramount Theater
215 East Main Street
Charlottesville, VA 22902
Book Signing to follow
Exhibition: Reality Show
June 3 - 24
New City Arts Welcome Gallery
114 3rd Street, NE
Charlottesville, VA 22902
Doug DuBois' photographs are in the collection of the MOMA in NY, SFMOMA in San Francisco, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and LACMA in LA. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (2012), the MacDowell Colony, The NEA, and The John Gutmann Foundation.
DuBois’ work is widely shown and included in many exhibitions and publications including the J. Paul Getty Museum, Where We Live: Photographs from the Berman Collection (2007), the Museum of Modern Art, The Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort (1991) and in magazines including The New York Times, TIME, Details, GQ, The Telegraph (London). His first monograph, All the Days and Nights, was published by Aperture in 2009.
DuBois is an associate professor at Syracuse University and on the faculty at the Hartford Art School’s MFA Program in Photography.
My Last Day at Seventeen looks at the bravado and adventure of childhood with an eye toward its fragility and inevitable loss. The photographs were made over a five-year period in Russell Heights, a small housing estate in Cobh, County Cork, Ireland. In 2015, Aperture Foundation launched a successful Kickstarter campaign to finance two editions of My Last Day at Seventeen: a trade edition for sale to the public and a “community edition” printed and designed exclusively for the families of Russell Heights.
Combining portraits, spontaneous encounters, and collaborative performances, the images in Doug DuBois' My Last Day at Seventeen hover between documentary and fiction.
DuBois says, “The book depicts an eternal summer—there’s no school and the weather is mostly sunny and warm. I never set out to document, in the traditional sense of that word, the life of the community. My idea was to contemplate the threshold that marks the time between childhood and the advent of adult responsibilities."
Reality Show, an exhibition featuring the work Doug DuBois: My Last Day at Seventeen provides an incisive examination of the uncertainties of growing up in Ireland today, while highlighting the unique relationship sustained between artist and subject. It depicts a world of not-quite-adults struggling—publicly and privately—through the last days of their childhood.
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