In December 2010, photographer Lori Vrba de- buted her series “Piano Farm” at a one-night publicdisplaymountedinalargelyunrefurbished 19th century home in New Orleans. The pop-up exhibition was inspired by her dealer, Jennifer
Schwartz of the Jennifer Schwartz Gallery in Atlanta,
who had urged her to “stir [up] some attention” during
the annual PhotoNOLA festival. Edward Hébert, director of A Gallery for Fine Photography in New Orleans,
agreed to curate the show, and introduced Vrba to
friends who lived in the upper floors of an 1855 house
in the Treme neighborhood. They agreed to let Vrba
take over the ground floor for what she hoped would
be “an out-of-the-box, blowout event” that would attract PhotoNOLA attendees, workshop teachers and
portfolio reviewers as well as local art patrons.
The plan succeeded beyond Vrba’s expectations.
Close to 300 people attended the opening, and Vrba
sold several prints. But what delighted Vrba the most
was how she felt when, moments before guests arrived, she finished installing her black-and-white prints,
mounted in custom-built frames with small lights inside, in the house’s ballroom-size parlors. Vrba says the
colors in the crumbling plaster walls matched the tones
© JENNIFER SCHWARTZ
Opposite: Guests at the opening of Lori Vrba’s “Piano Farm”
at an 1855 home in New Orleans. Above: Vrba’s prints installed
in the home’s parlor in custom-built frames. Left: “Rebecca’s
Palm” 2010, from the “Piano Farm” series.
in her prints. “It felt seamless. The imagery was part of
the house and the house worked with the imagery.”
Like other photographers who have mounted
pop-up exhibits, Vrba found that hanging photos
in a space not designed for displaying art presented
numerous logistical challenges. But as other photog-
raphers and curators are discovering, pop-up exhibi-
tions offer a way to present photos in a new context
and lure an audience that might not seek out photog-
raphy in a gallery.
BRINGING
IMAGES TO THE
COMMUNITY
A desire to communicate with people affected by
Hurricane Katrina was the primary reason photogra-
pher Jake Price decided to project documentary im-
ages onto the wall of the lower Ninth Ward levee two
years after it had breached. Price edited images he and
13 other documentary photographers had shot in the
weeks after the flood, and set them to music and am-
bient sound recordings to produce “Eyes on Katrina,” a
40-minute multimedia presentation. “I’ve never been
comfortable just showing up, shooting and leaving”
the scene of a news story, explains Price. “I wanted the
citizens [of New Orleans] to have their say, tell me they
like the work or they don’t.”
On the second anniversary of Katrina, when the
