March Exhibit at the Firehouse Theater…
Richard Perry is an award winning and broadly exhibited photographer whose portfolio “Route 66, Oklahoma” is a haunting series of portals and passageways into “time past” along this iconic American roadway.
Finely detailed and sharply focused, Perry’s photographs are marked by a singularly unique visual perspective and composition.
Perry has trained at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts; Massachusetts College of Art and Design; and the Photography Atelier of the Griffin Museum of Photography.
Perry’s photography manifests – “a particular appreciation for the enriching power of light… (a light which) is enticement as well as illumination.” (Mark Feeney, Boston Globe)
Artist Statement:
“While Route 66 has inspired music, movies, various pieces of literature, art, and even a television show, it is John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, the story of the Joad family’s migration across Oklahoma to California during the Dust Bowl era in the 1930s, that captures the true history and power of that road. Steinbeck’s uses the road as metaphor for the suffering of the farmers whose land was turned into a bleak dustbowl by overuse and poor land management encouraged by an unknowing government and exploited by avaricious bankers and greedy agricultural corporations. Farmers were forced off the land and headed west to what they envisioned as a land of plenty and their salvation.
I have read this book six times and still find the depiction of the overwhelming oppression by the powerful appalling and the strength, determination and struggle of the farm workers to survive with hope for a better life to be inspiring….There are still original buildings in the small towns and villages in Oklahoma that were the essence of US Route 66. Time has taken its toll on many of them while others have been kept up as usable space often serving the same function as the original intent. These reflect what life was and in some ways still is on the original road. The spirit and history of the people and their quest lives on and is accessible to those of us who look closely for it.
That is what this portfolio honors. It captures the spirit, determination, and history that contributed so much to the building of this country.” (Richard Perry)