Ralph Burns: A Persistence of Vision

Image Credit: Installation View, Ralph Burns: A Persistence of Vision, March 5 - July 24, 2016, BRAHM.

March 5 - July 24, 2016

Organized by the Asheville Art Museum and guest curated by J. Richard Gruber, Ph.D.

Ralph Burns has long been recognized as a documentary photographer whose images have captured the diverse and enigmatic nature of ritual and religion, and who has explored the subjective and often defining nature of belief, worship, and culture. Like his predecessors — such as Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark and Robert Frank — Burns uses his cameras to probe a constantly shifting human landscape and to document the public and private aspects of culture and religion in transition, often working at the unclear and overlapping intersection of both. Throughout his career, Burns has displayed a continuous and persistent interest in the motivations for worship and ritual while maintaining a compassionate and nonjudgmental intimacy with his subjects. He has photographed both collective and individualized manifestations of what he sees as a seemingly irrepressible human need to ritualize loss, love, and death, and to formally externalize and codify hope and the desire for transcendence. A native of Louisiana and a resident of Asheville since 1975, Burns has travelled great distances to photograph a specific event or religious festival. He has photographed in New Orleans, Asheville and Western North Carolina, the American South, Mexico, Cuba, Israel, England, Thailand, Nepal, Afghanistan, and Europe. Burns is recognized both nationally and internationally, exhibiting his photographs in museums worldwide.