Exhibition Overview
Contents
+/- 70 photographs, including vintage works, original Polaroids,
Horenstein’s documentary films
Ephemera
Publications
Dimensions
Various
Public Programming
Photographer and curators are available for a panel discussions, a lectures , and film screenings.
Curator
Addie Elliott and Eszti Bakos
Contact Details
info@elliott.gallery
+31 (0)6 85724797
Fee
Please inquire.
In the America of the 1970s, entire worlds existed on the margins of mainstream culture, and Henry Horenstein was there to document them. Histories. Tales from the 70s brings together photographs from the decade, shaped by storytelling, humor, and a natural affinity for communities often overlooked by history.
Coming of age at a moment when new social histories were shifting attention toward anonymous people, working-class life, and everyday culture, Horenstein absorbed these ideas and made them his own. Following in the tradition of the great chroniclers of urban oddity, Brassaï and Weegee, his photographs celebrate the subtle quirkiness of the everyday.
The exhibition draws on four bodies of work:
Close Relations, made during his student years at Rhode Island School of Design, turns the camera on family and friends — a warm, humorous portrait of the particular moment when adolescence gives way to adulthood, and a document of a specific place and time that somehow feels universal.
Speedway 72 records the world of small-town New England car racing with the same eye: beat-up cars customised for the track, drivers and fans dressed in the styles of the era, a closed and vivid universe preserved in precise detail.
Racing Days enters the altogether different world of the thoroughbred racetrack, its tensions, its characters, its gritty elegance. This is a series that began casually, between races, and grew into something Horenstein shot largely for himself.
Honky Tonk documents the early years of the United States’ country music scene: the honky tonks, the hard-working operators and lonely dreamers, future legends like Dolly Parton, and already-established stars, such as Waylon Jennings and Jerry Lee Lewis performing, signing autographs, and brushing up against their loyal fans.
Taken together, the four series form a social portrait of an era and its overlooked corners, the resulting work is at once historically significant and deeply, unmistakably human.
The exhibition offers strong potential for public and educational programming. Themes include US social history, the American documentary tradition, and the representation of working-class and subcultural life. Studying under legendary photographers Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Minor White, Horenstein's mentor lineage provides opportunities for lectures and panel discussions exploring their influence on his work. His decades-long teaching career at RISD and two widely used instructional texts give the exhibition particular relevance for academic audiences and photography students. Horenstein’s critically acclaimed films offer further programming opportunities for film screenings during the exhibition's run.
Many of the works included in the exhibition have been exhibited worldwide, among them a solo presentation of the Honky Tonk series at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, Washington DC.
"From stock car racing to country music stars, the US photographer is one of the great documenters of Americana."
— The Guardian
“Feel free to view these pictures as a random collection of kooky shots from the early 1970s. It is all of that. But I hope you will also see it as it was meant, a portrait of a unique place and time. A history.”
— Henry Horenstein
Henry Horenstein
Henry Horenstein (b. 1947) is an American photographer, filmmaker, and educator based in Boston. He studied history at the University of Chicago before earning his BFA and MFA at Rhode Island School of Design, where he has held the position of Professor of Photography since the 1970s. A student of Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Minor White, Horenstein credits his mentors with shaping his distinctive approach to composition and subject matter. Callahan's advice "Photograph what you love. Even if you make bad pictures, you'll at least have a good time" has infused his work with an energy of constant curiosity.
Describing himself as a documentary photographer, Horenstein's work focuses on fringe, working-class, and under-recognised communities. Grounded in storytelling and humor, his photographs celebrate the subtle quirkiness of everyday life — from Nashville's legendary honky tonks and New England race tracks to the thoroughbred racing circuit and suburban family life in Massachusetts.
Horenstein has published over forty books, among them monographs including Honky Tonk, Racing Days, Close Relations, and Shoot What You Love, alongside two widely used instructional texts that have shaped the education of hundreds of thousands of photography students. His work is collected and exhibited internationally, and the Smithsonian Institution has named him one of the ten defining figures in the history of photography, alongside Julia Margaret Cameron, Dorothea Lange, and Richard Avedon.
Venues
To be announced