Photography of Robert Monroe coming to Port of Call

WARWICK — A retrospective of some of the most outstanding work by New York photographic artist Robert Monroe will be presented from Saturday, April 1, to Saturday, April 29, at the Port of Call Gallery at 40 Main St. in Warwick. The exhibit will showcase more than 45 of the original pieces from Monroe’s “Rearrangement of the Human Form” series, including dramatic black and white photographs produced during the late ‘60s, along with some large format giclees. Selected silverradiant prints, for which he received a U.S. patent, will be shown. They are a permanent collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. This exhibit, curated by Monroe’s long-time friend, Warwick graphic artist Min Jae Hong, will be the first time many of the pieces have been available for public viewing since the ‘80s. “Robert Monroe’s work … is not a documentation of man, but a rearrangement of forms, always keeping the essence of man or woman, and producing a totality greater than the man,” wrote Elayne H. Varian, director of the contemporary wing of the Finch College Museum of Art, when his photographs were exhibited in 1967 in New York City. Time Magazine’s review of that show stated, “Photography is still a documentary art. One cameraman seeking to surmount those limitations, and succeeding admirably, is Robert Monroe, who takes the human figure as his starting point and then reassembles its forms.” Monroe’s photographs have also been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Neikrug Gallery in New York City, and hang in the permanent collections of the U.S. Congressional Library, Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., The Brooklyn Museum, Pfizer International, George Eastman House, and with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Monroe is now retired and lives in Cuddebackville. For more information, call 986-2216 or 258-3020.