Unpacked Box

UNPACKED BOX
The 2018 book project called “Unpacked Box,” featuring new bodies of work from two photographic artists in the Midwest, with an accompanying response essay by a third. With concept and editing by Daniel J. King,  the book intends to bring photographs pulled from personal archives into conversation with one another in the present.

Featuring newly-published work by artist Rebecca Holbrook-Erhart (Chicago, IL) and James Luckett (Yellow Springs (OH), with a response essay by artist Ray Klimek (Highland Park, NJ).

In the process of doing their work, photographers inevitably generate archives. These two photographers think their way with and through the things of a world that is aloof yet simultaneously available to our perceptions, our curiosity, and our projections.

Ray Klimek
About The Artists

James Luckett
Working for over twenty years in art and photography and exhibited nationally, artist James Luckett has an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona, worked as a master printer in a forensic photography lab and taught award-winning photography classes in Tucson and Chicago. He is the recipient of a 2011 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, now living in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Rebecca Holbrook-Erhart
Kentucky, born and raised, now lives in Chicago, IL. Her work rests on the power of the photograph to document both the familial and familiar, and in doing so, to reveal our subjective, interior interpretations of the images we make, keep, and tell. This work is difficult, emotionally fraught stuff lying just beneath the veneer of everyday places and things.

Artist Ray Klimek‘s insightful essay, “Haunted Archives and Shadow Projects,” which ties the projects of both Holbrook-Erhart and Luckett together, challenging the viewer/reader to consider how we assign meanings to photographs with words and related personal narratives, elements that change with time and circumstance. Klimek is a profoundly literate visual artist, was awarded a 2004 International Center of Photography-The Tierney Family Foundation Grant, and a 2003 Teaneck, NJ Grant from The Puffin Foundation. His teaching straddles studio arts, art history & theory, film, and literary courses, reaching back decades at variety of institutions.

Interview with Arts and Culture’s Emily Votaw at WOUB (Athens, OH)