The Colorado Photographic Arts Center has changed locations with considerable frequency over its 60-year history, and no one knows that better than its current executive director, Samantha Johnston. During her tenure — just eight years now — CPAC has had four different headquarters in various parts of Denver.
Each move was more than packing and unpacking. It also required adjusting to new gallery spaces, setting up classrooms for its students, transporting the organization’s substantial in-house holdings and launching a fresh campaign to tell the public exactly where they could find CPAC’s popular exhibitions of work by photographers from Colorado and beyond.
But CPAC’s latest change of place, to the first floor of a high-rise at 1200 Lincoln St., might serve it for the long haul. Everything feels right about it, particularly its physical location, on a busy thoroughfare in the culturally rich Golden Triangle Creative District.
The neighborhood is a regular destination for art fans already and, for many, CPAC’s new building will be familiar, too. For several years, it housed the Art Institute of Colorado, which shut down in 2018. The structure has since been converted into residential apartments.
CPAC has a 10-year lease, with the option to extend that another 10 years, according to Johnston.
The new CPAC home is, to use an appropriate adjective, photogenic. Johnston spent more than two years — working with architect Nathan Gulash of Semple Brown Design — customizing the 4,000-square-foot space to fit its needs. There are work rooms, dark rooms, offices, stacks for the archives and an L-shaped exhibition hall with a sliding wall that will allow it to be divided up for multiple shows.
The pair kept things neat and clean, and monochromatic. The walls are white, of course, and the ceiling, with its plumbing and duct work exposed, is matte black. The galleries are elegant, but meant to disappear in favor of the photo shows that will occupy them.
The current exhibition, titled “Tell Me a Story,” fits the space well. The show, which runs through Jan. 6, features work by a mix of regional, national and international photographers. Guest juror Mary Statzer, the chief photography curator at the New Mexico Museum of Art, chose the work from more than 500 submissions.
“Tell Me a Story” explores the idea of photography as a format for storytelling, but in a very specific way. What is the power, the show asks, of a single image, to relate a complex human tale?
The answer comes in 32 photos — digital prints on paper, for the most part — rendered in various shapes and sizes, and in different styles. Many fit easily into the common language of visual arts. For example, some are portraits, while others are landscapes. Some photos capture domestic scenes of everyday life, others are clearly staged. Most fall somewhere in the middle of all that.
One example is photographer Mark Coggins’ shot, titled “4-H Club,” a black-and-white image that captures a teenage boy, dressed in a hoodie, nestled up with two pigs. All three of them are enjoying a nap. The photo is set in the sort of metal pen that will look familiar to anyone who has wandered the hay-filled halls of Denver’s annual Stock Show and watched kids compete with their livestock.
Is it a traditional portrait? It goes a long way toward capturing the personality of this young competitor. Or does it fall under the category of photojournalism or documentary? It is certainly meant to freeze a moment in time at an important cultural event.
The same questions surround the photo titled “The Commuter,” by Jason McKinsey, which presents a middle-aged man behind the wheel of an automobile. He is apparently stalled in traffic, looking off into the distance, waiting for things to move along during rush hour.
Several things make this image compelling. First, it captures the man through his windshield — how did the photographer get such a vantage point? Second, is it a real scene or manufactured? Is this an actual instance in a daily commute or is the man an actor and the whole image fiction? The piece has a cinematic feel.
And more to the point of the exhibition overall, what is the narrative here? Who is this guy? Where is he coming from and where is he going? The image begs us to fill in the missing parts.
That is true with nearly all of the photos in “Tell Me a Story.” Each is a mystery without quite enough clues to solve. They hint at a bigger tale, giving us neither the beginning nor the end, just a split second of the action.
I found them provocative but also frustrating, a reminder that we can never understand the whole truth by looking at a single moment in time. We can only guess — and we often guess wrong.
This exhibit is content to dwell in the conundrums, and many viewers will enjoy that. Humans love a good puzzle, and this show succeeds by delivering them in overwhelming numbers.
But it also, quite clearly, shows the inability of single photographic images — served up without context or captions or other photos — to convey complicated truths. When people fill in the blanks, they bring their own biases and personal histories into the equation, including their preconceptions about race, class, gender, politics and social history, and that influences their comprehension. These photos spark the imagination but they also invite misinterpretations in a way that feels not quite right.
Instead of being powerful narrative tools, the solitary photos can feel like weak links in the information chain. They want us to come to conclusions without all the facts, to feel smart and well-informed when, in fact, we know little. They are certainly not dangerous in any way, but they underscore how some images — especially those manufactured through artificial means with the intent of serving as propaganda — might actually be dangerous.
Either way, they are riveting, and the show is exceptionally cohesive and relentlessly on point. Viewers might find the shots inspirational or be annoyed by the whole exercise, though they will, no doubt, stare for a very long time.
Ray Mark Rinaldi is a Denver freelancer who specializes in fine arts.
