Photographs can be of something or about something, conveying a message—or layered messages—through composition, color, lighting, framing and subject matter. Such is the case with Greta Pratt’s “Jamestown is Sinking” which opened recently at the Chrysler Museum of Art.
Pratt, who lives in Norfolk, is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow and has had work exhibited nationally and internationally. In the current show at the Chrysler, Pratt implies a linkage between colonialism, capitalism and climate change but she invites you to think — what you think is largely up to you.
As naturalist John Muir famously said, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” While there is nothing on the nose in these photos to tether colonialism, capitalism and climate change, it is there as context.
Colonialism, many scholars would argue, provided cheap labor, raw materials and markets via the exploitation of colonized territories, in addition to the ideologies of competition and dominance that stoked capitalist engines. In turn, some experts argue, capitalism’s profit motive incentivizes behaviors that value economic growth over environmental sustainability.
After reading a few years ago about how sea level rise is sinking Jamestown Island – and the pandemic curtailing travel-based photo projects – Pratt turned her lens closer to home. Traveling through the region, including Jamestown, she sought out people— visitors and reenactors— and other resonant subjects on former plantations, reservations and settlements. Her approach connected to a through line in her life since childhood when the historical markers that dotted family road trips imprinted on her a curiosity about who wrote what was on those plaques and, especially, whose history they were telling.
Pratt has long been concerned with identity, history, the production and consumption of myth, the symbolic vestiges of ancient traditions, memory, patriotism and climate change. Given that Norfolk is considered a “ground zero” for climate-related flooding, this body of portraits, landscapes, streetscapes and interiors overlays these interests in an evocative way. But one laced with irony.
Pratt’s self-acknowledged irony is absent jeering and judging and is gentler and more generous. In one photo, a man mows his lawn: a raised, retaining wall-enclosed cube of turf juxtaposed against a backdrop of the Chesapeake Bay lapping at the shore a few yards away and an adjacent plot of sand dunes and sea grasses. In another image, mostly drained of color, a white panel truck under a stormy sky appears inundated by the sea, surrounded by flood waters near a marina. The truck is framed by a lamp post and a fish-shaped seafood market sign, what the artist refers to as “a fish out of water.”
Though Pratt’s subject matter is varied, portraits make up a significant aspect of this show. She relishes the ability to “look into people’s eyes” in a sustained way not often possible when not behind her medium-format digital camera.
While the portraits, too, represent a range, Chelsea Pierce, the Chrysler’s McKinnon curator of modern and contemporary art, foregrounds the motif of the “Sisyphean task.” The subject of one such portrait is Edward, a man Pratt stumbled upon behind a motel on Shore Drive. He smiles into the camera, surrounded by puddles, as he takes a break from his repetitive labor of shoveling sand back onto the dune.
The exhibition is not just about America’s first English colony. Rather, Jamestown serves as a metaphor, presenting us with the same opportunity as when faced with a body of water: We can dwell at the surface and marvel at the reflections, or we can dive deep where we are likely to be made more acutely aware of our humanity while encountering disconcerting truths. Or we can do both.
Open through July 27. The Chrysler Museum, One Memorial Place, Norfolk, 757-664-6200, www.chrysler.org
