Jed Fielding Mexico City #201 Gelatin silver print, 23 x 15 inches, 58.5 x 38 cm. Edition of 10 2002

Andrea Meislin Gallery 526 West 26th Street, Suite 214 New York City, NY 10001 USA (city map) Send E-mail tel +1 212 - 627 2552 www.andreameislin.com

Andrea Meislin Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Jed Fielding's Look at me: Photographs from Mexico City. The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph of the same name, published by the University of Chicago Press, and includes essays by Vince Aletti and Britt Salvesen. Fielding is a Chicago-based photographer working at the intersection of street photography and high modernism, whose attention to the formal qualities of surface and light is characteristic of his teachers at the Rhode Island School of Design - Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan.

In Look at me, Fielding moves deftly into a partnership with children attending several of Mexico City's schools for the blind. Throughout his career as a street photographer, Fielding's work has been based on collaboration between himself and his willing subjects. His new work in Look at me takes this collaboration to an intriguing, new level - what does it mean to photograph those who cannot return the photographer's gaze?

Rather than adhering to a documentary point of view, Fielding aims to create elegantly formal portraits. These schools for the blind provide a nurturing environment in which the mothers attend school daily with their children. In this setting, even more than in his work on the street, Fielding was able to concentrate on the formal aspects of his work, and he invites the viewer to contemplate these images with their own sense of wonder.

Jed Fielding was born in Boston in 1953. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. He has photographed extensively in Peru, Greece, Egypt, Spain, the United States, Italy, and Mexico for more than thirty-five years. Fielding's photographs have been widely collected and exhibited, and are represented in private and public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Art Institute of Chicago; and International Center of Photography, New York. Fielding currently lives in Chicago.