Opening Reception, June 5th, 6pm-8pm

Paolo Pellegrin: Witness to History
and in the Red Room: Jehad Nga
June 5th through July 19th, 2008

Bonni Benrubi Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition of photographs by Paolo Pellegrin with Jehad Nga in the Red Room. Pellegrin and Nga are the contemporary photojournalists who illustrate our world as history is written everyday on the battlefield, in the refugee camp, and along Madison Avenue.

Pellegrin, a Magnum photographer with five first place World Press Photo prizes under his belt turned his eye to photography while studying architecture as a young adult in Rome. He has since photographed historical conflicts across the globe from Kosovo to Darfur. Shooting in black and white like his predecessors, Pellegrin chooses this reduced palate to express the timelessness of the events he documents and to convey the universality of the emotional content wrapped up in the turbulence of the moment he has seized.

Pellegrin is drawn to extreme situations, they are his canvas, it is where he finds the irony of life: the bittersweet intermingling of chaos and destruction with man’s innate desire to live. Despite the magnitude of what he sees, Pellegrin doesn’t turn away, he acts as our medium, showing us our darker selves, but at the same time what we can be and the depth of capability of the human soul.

In the Red Room: Bonni Benrubi Gallery is pleased to present color photographs by thirty-year-old artist Jehad Nga, Arresting and poetic, Nga’s photographs of Sudanese and Kenyan café patrons offer a rare and personal look at those ravaged by years of drought and poverty. Using only a single ray of sun beaming through the café doorway, Nga’s photographs highlight the individuals themselves by naturally removing them from their surroundings. The profound simplicity of this arrangement speaks volumes about what is left when everything surrounding a life has been taken, and how photojournalism communicates this to the Western World. Nga’s work conveys timelessness not because of what he sees at large, but what is not seen.