Students got an artist’s perspective last Thursday as photographer Vaughn Sills presented a gallery talk at the Carroll Reece Museum.
According to Blair White of the Reece Museum, Sills discussed her documentary photographs now on display at the museum.
“She has very telling, powerful pictures. The photographs collectively tell a wonderful story,” White said. “Further, the composition of the print and the process itself is interesting.”
Sills’ photographs chronicle the life of a rural Georgia family for a period of more than 22 years. Sills first came across the Toole family one day after driving down a dirt road outside of Athens, Ga.
She stopped at the home of the Tooles, who agreed to allow her to photograph them.
A Canadian native, Sills has returned to Georgia every year since that first encounter to add to her collection of Toole family portraits.
Though she said that photography often required behaviors that she was not comfortable with, such as intrusion and imposition, her curiosity for people has enabled her to overcome such obstacles.
“The camera has become for me a way of learning, a way of seeing and attempting to understand, and, in the end, my way of expressing what I feel, how I see this world.
“The Tooles were willing to allow me the time and the intrusion into their lives. I have wondered why. And I imagine that they accepted that I was not other than what I said: I was interested in taking pictures of a family, and they were that.”
Sills’ book, One Family, contains the photographs from her exhibit.
“It takes viewers beyond the stereotype often placed upon people with limited means,” White said. “You realize that you’re looking at 22 years of this family’s life.”
One Family was supported in part by grants from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities, the Polaroid Foundation and the Polaroid Corporation, and was published by the University of Georgia Press.
Currently, Sills serves as assistant professor of photography at Simmons College in Cambridge, Mass. She holds an M. F. A. in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design.
White said that Sills’ photographs will be on display at the museum through Wednesday, April 24. “This is the first time Sills’ artwork has been exhibited on campus,” he said. “We very rarely show the same person’s work twice.”
Reece Museum hours are 9 a.m.-4 p.m Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday; Thursday 9 a.m.-7 p.m.; and Saturday and Sunday 1-4 p.m. Call 439-4392 for more information

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