Rock In A Landslide Exhibition

Photographs by Geoffrey Biddle
Curated by Marina Chao

Opening Reception
November 15, 2023
6 - 8 PM
5 East Third Street, 8th Floor, NYC

Geoffrey Biddle Studio and the Mary Ann Unger Estate are pleased to present Rock In A Landslide, an exhibition of photographs by Geoffrey Biddle at his and Unger’s former home and studios on the Bowery. The installation also includes select works by sculptor Mary Ann Unger.

This exhibition is curated by Marina Chao, Curator at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and celebrates the release of two publications by Biddle: Rock In A Landslide and Eve and Me. Rock In A Landslide is an intimate and candid portrait of his and Unger’s lives together, tracing their charged partnership and parallel creative practices through falling in love, parenting their daughter Eve, and Unger’s thirteen-year battle with cancer, ending with her death in 1998. Part memoir part monograph, its companion volume Eve and Me is a series of father/daughter self-portraits, from Eve’s birth to her college graduation, paired with texts written directly to Eve to trace the trajectory of their lives together. The books traverse city playgrounds and country fields, without and within the shadow of illness and loss. Biddle edits and frames his images with the clarifying distance of time—making sense of the immediacy and tidal emotions enshrined in the photographs. His recovery of that experience reveals what so many families face with both fear and determination.

Chao’s selection from the books feature new black-and-white prints of photographs taken from 1975 to 2000. They tell the interwoven stories of Biddle’s long parallel dedication to family and photography—giving form to his identity as a son, husband, father, and artist. Biddle’s ongoing practice folds together the tradition of documentary photography (widely recognized in his series Alphabet City) and the vernacular practice of making family pictures. Chao observes, “The images range from a wonderfully cacophonous photograph of Eve getting a haircut in a busy Manhattan barbershop as a young child, the action compressed into and reflected back by the mirror in front of her; to a double-portrait of Unger and The Well, the artist proud and at ease in front of her sculpture; to poignant juxtapositions of mother and daughter during Unger’s illness, a silent understanding between them; to impromptu self-portraits with Unger and Eve, made at arm’s length and alive with playful spontaneity. Biddle’s photographs—full of attention, tenderness, and a palpable fascination with the quiet moments that shape our lives—are as deeply personal as they are universal in their reflection on profound love and loss.”

Rock in a Landslide and Eve and Me were published in 2023 by Working Assumptions.

The exhibition is open by appointment. Select works by Eve Biddle and Joshua Frankel will also be on view.

If you are a member of the press and would like to arrange a preview, please write to Brent Foster Jones, press@maryannunger.org.

Marina Chao is curator at the Center for Photography at Woodstock. She previously held curatorial positions at the International Center of Photography—where she organized Multiply, Identify, Her (2018) and contributed to the publication Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and the Configuration of Self (Aperture and ICP, 2018)—and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

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