City Gallery Reopens With Pictures Of Daily Practice

A tree’s roots crawl across a sewer grate. A fetching white bird named Murphy cocks its head for the camera. Stars unfold over a wire fence.

These and many other photographs by New Haven-based photographer Joy Bush comprise ​“Where I Go Is What I See” — the first exhibition for City Gallery’s reopening from quarantine on Saturday, June 13. The photographs are selected from pictures Bush has taken on daily walks of about four miles for the past five years.

“It became a practice for me,” Bush said, of ​“figuring out what I wanted to show.”

The show is slated to run through August.

For Bush, the photographs coalesce into eight themes: invasions, animals, interiors, ephemera, barriers, discoveries, pools, and runes. In keeping with city restrictions and public health guidelines, there will not be an opening reception in the Upper State Street space, though people can visit Bush at the gallery on Saturday from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Groups will be limited to 5 people at a time, and everyone is asked to wear a mask and observe social distancing protocols. During the summer, City Gallery will be open Saturdays and Sundays from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. and by appointment.

A portion of the sales from Bush’s show will be donated to the Connecticut Bail Fund. ​“It seems so important right now to make a statement that I support what’s going on,” Bush said of the recent protests.

“Initially I wanted to have 150 pictures,” Bush said of the exhibit, marking roughly each week for three years. But she realized that such an exhibit might be a little unwieldy. As she sifted through the photographs, the themes emerged for her. First, there would be no people, which Bush half-joked was a reaction to her long-running job as a university photographer for Southern Connecticut State University, at which she took many pictures of people. But she found that taking people physically out of the picture didn’t erase their presence.

She settled on the theme of invasion to describe images she had of ​“technology overtaking nature, but nature kept on going.” Her barriers theme included people’s front yards, which struck her as a marker for ​“how people define themselves” in relation to their neighborhood. Her theme of interiors brought out the humor in her work, as in toy cars brought to scale by the right angle. One of her most sly photographs was of a folding table set up near the wall, under a spotlight. It was set up that way when she found it, the only thing in the room, and it amused her. ​“Why is there this spotlight on the table?” she asked. ​“What’s it waiting for?”

Similarly, the sardonic point that brought together her pictures of pools, from a basin of water in the Ball and Socket Factory in Cheshire to a deflated kiddie pool in someone’s yard filled with about two inches of water, was that ​“you wouldn’t want to swim in any of them,” she said.

Other photographs brought out the meditative side of her daily practice. ​“Sometimes I get obsessed with an idea that isn’t worth thinking about,” Bush said. Taking photographs, by contrast, ​“gets me out of myself.” Perhaps this is particularly true of the grid on the gallery’s back wall of street shapes that she grouped under the theme of runes. As she noticed the shapes of patched up pavement, she began to imagine them being like hieroglyphs. What did they mean? ​“Turn and go in another direction,” she suggested. ​“Stop and think about what you’re doing.”

Bush’s daily photography practice has continued throughout the government-mandated shutdowns and social distancing restrictions. ​“I feel like my life didn’t change that much,” she said. Though she missed the chance to socialize with friends, ​“it’s almost like I was self-quarantining on my walks” before the pandemic began. She caught images of animals at home and abroad — a friend’s cat, a lizard on a patch of grass in Costa Rica, a storefront in Madison.

Under the theme of ephemera were photos she thought of certain moments: ​“If you don’t catch it, it will disappear.” A cloud perched on a post. The sky reflected and somehow captured in a puddle. Among her discoveries were ​“finding things you don’t expect to see — things that are out of place,” like four basketball hoops somehow clustered together.

But having walked through the themes, Bush also had a sense of their fragility. For years it has been fashionable in the world of photography to create photo essays, a narrative that fits the images together. Bush felt that she was rebelling somewhat against that. She cited a quote from famous dancer Isadora Duncan: ​“If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.” Bush had similar feelings about her photography practice.

“I don’t mean it in a confrontational way,” she said. ​“I’m just trying to take the best picture I can.”

Bush is heartened by the gallery’s reopening generally. ​“I think it’s important for people to see art — to get it back into their life,” she said. ​“The way you pay attention” to art is different in person than in a Zoom meeting or on a screen, ​“that face-to-face connection.” For Bush, it was another reminder about the need to be present in the world.

She recalled a talk she attended by National Geographic photographer Sam Abell, from whom Bush took a pearl of wisdom: after spending a lot of time trying to capture an image just right, it was important to look to see what was happening behind you, around you, to always be aware of your surroundings. Bush recalled Abell told a story about taking a picture of a sunset in Africa, only to look behind him and discover a herd of elephants walking close by. Bush said she’d never discovered a herd of elephants, but ​“some of the pictures here were taken that way.”

“Turn around,” she said. ​“The picture’s behind you.”

For more information about Joy Bush’s exhibition and other City Gallery activities, visit the gallery’s website. City Gallery is located at 994 State St.