CHECKPOINT CHARLIE

This month—as the world marks the twentieth anniversary of the Berlin wall’s demise— Kelly Gorham will unveil his exhibition, “The Stones have Memories” at the  7444 Gallery in Saranac Lake, a former sanitarium town in the frozen Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York.

“My guiding creative principal was to let the architecture speak for itself,” he says. “Is it possible to document emotion without photographing a human face?”

Commemorating the 9 November 2009 unifying of Berlin, photojournalist Kelly Gorham’s newest show studies the wall, looking at the structure as a modern architectural ruin.  Last year the Montana-based photographer—whose professional work has appeared in the New York Times and several major magazines—explored the urban neighborhoods of former East Berlin. Prior to his visit, Gorham did his homework, spending two years researching the city. The resulting subjects represent his careful selection of the starkest and most provocative symbols of a society that no longer exists. While much of the infamous barrier has since been razed, the Berlin of today still bears the scars of its former partition. Brilliantly captured by Gorham, the photographer portrays a city once divided between the principal victors of World War II and the erased institutions that were built upon fear and violence. http://www.gorhamphotography.com/berlin.htm