Until August 2005, Ben Lokey was a commercial photographer with an MFA from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. He had published with The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Hollywood Reporter, among many others; and spent many years working as company photographer for The Los Angeles Jazz Company, Ballet West, and Pennsylvania Ballet -- jobs in which Lokey was accustomed to the limelight of ballet and movie stardom. On August 29, Lokey lost most of his 40 years of professional photographic work, as well as a wide assortment of Nikons, Hasselblads, Canons, flashes and backdrops, when his two-story frame home in Ocean Springs, MS, was broken in half.
Lost and Found: Photographs 2005-08 is a new body of photographs produced entirely from the remnants of the destruction of the artist's studio. By their very existence, these photographs call into question some of the unquestioned assumptions behind the photojournalistic documents of the hurricane and its effects, which have stood until now as the most potent visual images of Katrina's impact. In Lokey's case, each half-salvaged photograph documents people and events that long precede Katrina, sometimes by decades. Far from showing an instant in time captured by the shutter's release, these prints are the result of hundreds of laborious hours of work by the artist during the past two and a half years. After cleaning thousands of individual prints of accumulated surface grime, Lokey studied the salvaged images to see if perhaps the combination of past and present may have resulted in any visually compelling mutations. Much to his surprise, in a small number of the destroyed photographs, Lokey discovered a poetic, even romantic, resonance that far outstripped anything he had ever envisioned creating as an artist.
For all intents and purposes, the sixty-five photographs on view are the work of an artist who did not exist prior to Katrina. Because they are being exhibited publicly for the first time, and all prints on view have been produced especially for this exhibition, the works in Lost and Found also offer a unique perspective on the principle that destruction is a powerfully creative force, if only because their strangely compelling beauty would not have been possible without Katrina. Not surprisingly, we view many of Lokey's 'new' subjects through the lens of catastrophe, as if the people in the photographs are eternally trapped by a mortal danger. Like so many artists in the Gulf Coast region, Lokey lost most of what he had in the hurricane, but in his case the impulse to create something completely new from the debris reveals a powerful urge to overcome adversity, to perceive new possibilities in the sweeping away of an old order, and to admire the extraordinary beauty which is invariably a by-product of the very worst catastrophes.
Curated by Dan Cameron.
For information, call (504) 528-3805
