Author and artist Robert Schultz has won the Soho Photo Gallery’s International Portfolio Competition and exhibited his work in the longstanding New York City gallery in a solo show July 24 – August 18, 2024.
The exhibition of 18 works—titled “One Root”—features portraits of U.S. Civil War soldiers and mourning family members developed in the flesh of leaves. His leafprints (sometimes called “chlorophyll prints”) are made using sunlight; no chemicals or transfers are involved in this “cameraless” process. Schultz draws his images from the U. S. Library of Congress’ Liljenquist Family Collection.
Additional works in the exhibition were made when Schultz arranged leafprints on a flatbed scanner in composition with plants from his wife’s flower gardens. These compositions are scanned in a darkened room with the machine’s lid removed, providing the image with a deep, black background.
Schultz will attend the show’s opening reception at the gallery July 25, 6- 8:00 pm. The reception is free and open to the public. One piece included the exhibition—“How the Dead Speak: Unidentified Union soldier and woman”—was named one of the “Ten-Best Photographs of 2021” by Michael Kirchoff, Editor-in-Chief of Analog magazine.
Previous solo exhibitions of Schultz’s work have been mounted by the Athenaeum Museum in Alexandria, Virginia and the ChromaProjects “Vault” gallery in Charlottesville, Virginia. His collaborative show with noted artist Binh Danh, “War Memoranda,” was mounted by Roanoke, Virginia’s Taubman Museum of Art and traveled to additional museum and college venues. That exhibition resulted in a book of art and text, War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Memory.
Individual works by Schultz have been included in group exhibitions across the country, frequently garnering jurors’ and directors’ awards. His art is held by the Library of Congress, college and university collections, and by private collectors in the U.S. and abroad.
Schultz has spoken by invitation at the National Gallery of Art, Oxford University, and at colleges, universities, and book festivals across the U.S. As a poet, novelist, and essayist, he has done residencies and given readings at many institutions and public venues. His novel, The Madhouse Nudes, was issued by Simon & Schuster in 1997, and books of his poetry and prose have appeared since 1979. His most recent collection of poetry is Into the New World (Slant Books, 2020). A work of history and biography, We Were Pirates, treated World War II submarine warfare (Naval Institute Press, 2009).
Soho Photo Gallery, located in lower Manhattan at 15 White Street, is New York City’s longest-running cooperative photography gallery. Schultz is one of three winning photographers in the gallery’s International Portfolio Competition.
Members of Soho Photo Gallery’s Portfolio Review Committee juried the competition. This group has reviewed thousands of portfolios since the gallery’s beginning in 1971. Selections were made based on submission of 10-15 “compositionally and technically strong images, with a consistent theme or topic.” The contest was open to all photographers worldwide 18 years or older.