Requiem: The Remains of the Day Exhibition Reception

From her work in San Quentin Prison in the mid-1980s, through her exploration in Widelux format documenting intimate portraits of her aging parents in the 1990s, to her engagement with marginalized communities over the past 20 years, Ruth Morgan’s lens has focused with deep empathy on people—probing their struggles, their communities, and their robust endurance. Some of her earlier work derives from the implicit intimacy between the participants in the encounter—the artist’s presence in contact with her subjects on the other side of the camera. Morgan is there, a character in the drama. The participants are not “subjects”; they are looking at her, not at a camera. “Requiem: Remains of the Day, made in 2022, in contrast to previous work, is completely devoid of people. The images reveal only what remains of the former lives of those not shown–what’s left after a devastating fire obliterated that displaced over 1000 people…