?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
ACCRA SHEPP (1962 - ) Morgan.
Gelatin silver emulsion on tobacco leaf on handmade Japan paper, 2004. 647x622 mm; 25 1/2x24 1/2 inches, (sheet). From the series The Tobacco Project 2003 - 2007.
Morgan is from Accra Shepp's study that explores photoreactive materials and a socio-economic investigation of the history of tobacco farming. The leaves he uses in replacement of photopaper are dried then flattened. Next, they are chemically treated. Ultimately, a light-sensitive coating is applied to record and fix the image. From 2003 - 2007, Shepp traveled to three farms in Georgia, Kentucky, and North Carolina to explore the relationship of tobacco farmers with their crop and the land on which it grows. He uses photoreactive materials to transform dried leaves into canvases that explore tobacco's fraught history and cultivation through the use of 18th and 19th-century enslavement to 21st-century migrant labor.
Born 1962 in New York City, Shepp is a writer and photographer. He graduated from Princeton University in 1984, where he studied with Emmet Gowin, then attained an MFA from NYU where he studied at the Institute of Fine Arts and the Conservation Center. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and The Victoria and Albert Museum.
