Photographer Bill Bamberger is
known for the innovative ways he has engaged whole communities in the
production and exhibition of his work. His projects explore large
social issues of our time by looking at how they are manifest in our families
and communities. Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory
(DoubleTake/W.W.Norton, 1998), with Cathy N. Davidson, won the Mayflower Prize
in Non-Fiction and was a semifinalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. His
photographs have appeared in Aperture, Doubletake, The Washington Post
Magazine, Harper’s and the New York Times Magazine. He
has been a featured guest on CBS Sunday Morning, CSPAN’s About Books, All
Things Considered with Noah Adams, and North Carolina
People with William Friday.
Bamberger has had one-person
exhibitions at the Yale University Art Gallery, the National Building Museum, the North Carolina Museum of Art and the Smithsonian
Institution. However, the exhibitions that mean most to him
have been staged in
unlikely places where galleries don’t exist: a gravel lot on San Antonio’s
Mexican-American West Side, an old department store in Mebane,
North Carolina, and a
deteriorating classroom
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on the main hall of Central High in Flint, Michigan.
In the year 2000, the
National Endowment for the Arts funded one of the largest community arts
initiatives in our nation’s history. Fifty-six artists, one per state and U.S.
territory, were invited to generate a public work addressing issues specific to
a community, yet universal in theme. In Michigan,
hosted by the Flint Institute of Arts, Bamberger spent six months inside Flint
Central High working closely with a core group of students. Together they produced a
collection of images and interviews about boys coming of age.
Boys Will Be Men is about the culture of maleness. The Flint
photographs were inspired by a similar project Bamberger undertook in the
mid-1980s at Deerfield Academy, a private all-male New
England boarding school. Although the Flint Central work and the Deerfield
work reflect distinctly different times, locations, and cultures, they show
striking similarities—how adolescence appears universal and classless. The
project reveals how boys relate, their simultaneous camaraderie and isolation,
and their identity as shaped by their expectations of what it is to be a man.
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In 2002 Bamberger collaborated
with designer Greg Snyder to produce a custom-designed mobile art gallery for a
national project about the meaning of home. Chrysanthe B. Broikos, senior
curator at the National Building Museum, writes: "The mobile gallery presents a
new, if not revolutionary, interpretation of what public art is—and means….We
are talking about creating new work that is a true collaboration among artists,
architects, and the residents of a community. And we are talking about bringing
this very thoughtful, tangible, and accessible art directly to other
underserved citizens in a way that can make them, and really all viewers,
reevaluate and examine what home means to them."
Bamberger is currently at work
on BALL, a grassroots project that explores the democratization of basketball
and the intersection of sports and culture in American life. BALL takes us on a
tour of America to small towns, large cities, rural
landscapes, fire stations, schoolyards, community centers and private
residences. This is a project about our obsession with sport and the diversity
of the American experience.
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