Linda Butler: Three Gorges November 2, 2005

http://www.photoalliance.org/
$8 General Admission, $4 students

Between 2000 and 2003, Linda Butler traveled to China eight times. She created both an artistic and a documentary record of the Yangtze river as it was being transformed by the Three Gorges Dam and the impact it had on those who lived near this vast project. Informal portraits of local inhabitants preserve a record of the people of the region as they take pigs to market, dismantle their villages, or work as coal porters. Large-format landscape images capture life along the river and the dramatic landscape, as massive construction projects irrevocably changed the Yangtze area forever.

Linda Butler will discuss both her most recent book, Yangtze Remembered, and her reflections on long-term creative projects and the influence of digital technology.

Linda Butler was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, and educated at Antioch College and the University of Michigan. She currently lives outside of Cleveland, Ohio, and has worked as an independent photographer for more than 25 years.

Butler has had more than 45 one-person exhibitions in the United States, Canada and Japan. Her photographs have appeared in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and the Yokohama Museum of Art in Japan.

Two of her books, Inner Light: The Shaker Legacy (1985) and Italy: in the Shadow of Time (1998) feature still life images and interiors. A third book, Rural Japan: Radiance of the Ordinary (1992), mixes still life imagery with the landscape. Her most recent book, Yangtze Remembered: The River Beneath the Lake, (2004) explores life along the Yangtze River in China as it is being transformed by the Three Gorges Dam.