Nancy Scherl is a fine art portrait photographer based in New York City. Stylistically, Nancy emulates cinema verité, particularly for her portrait series, often posing her subjects, offering subtle direction, and asking them to “act out” what they experience when they’re in a specific setting. The setting is frequently enhanced with formal lighting to create a specific ambience. Her portraits often invoke metaphor and social commentary. *(Though Nancy blurs the boundaries between pictorial, social documentary and street genres in much of her work, she distinguishes between her staged portrait series and her visual stories –the former being cinema verite’ applying social commentary; the latter being social documentary.)
She draws from Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment.” Her camerawork may include a predetermined background and sometimes controlled lighting, but she will capture her subjects more spontaneously, once they appear within her camera frame. Nancy refers to her reality-based narratives as being staged or partially staged realities.
She also creates fictional narratives, which she refers to as staged fantasies. As a provocateur, she lures viewers into her scientifically impossible visual worlds, designed to intrigue viewers into considering anew their formerly trusted points of view and aspects of the human condition.
Nancy completed an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media at New York City’s School of Visual Arts, following her undergraduate studies in documentary and fine art photography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a member of the American Society of Media Photographers, where she served as a board member from 2016 to 2019, and currently serves as President emerita and Treasurer, on the board of the Katonah Museum Artists’ Association (KMAA) in Katonah, New York. She is the Founder, and Producer of SHOP-TALK which is a round table discussion series about art, produced for the KMAA.
Scherl is the recipient of many awards and has exhibited globally including at FotoNostrum Mediterranean House of Photography, PX3 Espace Beaurepaire, A Smith Gallery, Praxis Gallery, South X Southeast, The Katonah Museum of Art and the Hammond Museum.
6:30 - Announcements
6:40 - Curtain Raiser
6:50 - Speaker Presentation
Zoom details will be emailed to all active members on April 10th.