Untitled © Jason Lazarus

We are excited to introduce this limited-edition print, Untitled by Jason Lazarus to our collecting audience. The photograph is drawn from the ongoing series 2004-present, in which Lazarus utilizes the conceptual self-portrait as a mode of personal and cultural investigation. Whether personally, politically, or culturally oriented, the photographic works are consistently tied back to the artist’s insistence on using contemporary photography as a conceptual parameter with which to investigate. The sometimes visually disparate results beckon the viewer to actively navigate the place where, conceptually, the images coalesce.  This place is not only filled with the personal and the public, but an uncertainty that seeks to empathize with an audience in the predicament of the same-shared world.

Lazarus collaborated with Aperture earlier this year on his Too Hard To Keep photo archive. Visitors were encouraged to bring in sentimental photographs that were too hard to keep, but too meaningful to destroy. In addition to being added to the project’s ongoing blog, an installation of the images was on view at Aperture Gallery, and was also part of a group exhibition at the Queens Museum of Art.

Jason Lazarus (b.1975) received his MFA in Photography in 2003 and has actively exhibited around the country and abroad while teaching photography part-time at Columbia College and the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Notable honors include an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship award, 2009; the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Award, Emerging Artist, 2008; and the Emerging Artist Artadia Grant in 2006. Jason’s work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, and the Bank of America LaSalle Photography collection among many others.

Jason Lazarus’s photo archive Too Hard to Keep, is a repository for photographs both too painful to keep and too meaningful to destroy. This on-going and expanding project will be displayed in two parts: an installation of photographs from the archive and a “drop box.” Anyone can add to the archive by depositing pictures in this box.

Do you have any photos ‘too hard to keep?’ come by Aperture Foundation and contribute to Jason Lazarus’ archive.

Submissions may include photos of friends, family, pets, places/objects too hard to view  again, etc.

 The reason you can’t live with the  photo or photo album I do not need to know… Lazarus is creating a repository for these images so that they may exist without being destroyed. Please dictate whether the images you submit to the archive are images not to be shown again, or images that may be exhibited in the future with other submissions to  the archive.

Here is a story from a recent submission:

I overheard a girl at a party talking resentfully about her ex-boyfriend, and feeling excited and opportunistic, I told her about my project. After a few weeks of emails, she invited me over to pick up some photos. We sat together as she sorted through a remainder of a large pile of pictures of her and her ex-boyfriend. Incidentally, her new boyfriend sat with us over this ritual. More than ever during this project, I felt a part of a narrative photographically as well as personally. The 140 some odd photos she submitted are a fantastic contribution to the archive–we have familiar faces dotting different landscapes, seasons, hairstyles, etc, but the same eyes, the same smiles, the same commitment to image themselves, together, in moments grand and banal. Their time together, four years total, reveals the way photography bookmarked moments, and begged of them a consistent engagement in building an archive together. Her contribution is a particularly incisive example of a submission that is a trauma, built over a significant amount of time and experience, that is less about inexplicable narratives then a familiar and traceable pattern of togetherness, intimacy, and visual rhythms…-Jason Lazarus

To hear more about this project visit: npr, art21, and nhpr!

Too Hard to Keep the installation is now on view as part of the group exhibition at The Queens Museum of Art, Not the Way You Remembered. On view through August 14, 2011.

Jason Lazarus graduated from Columbia College (Chicago) in 2002. His photography has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Hyde Park Art Center, and Andrew Rafacz (formerly Bucket Rider) Gallery, Chicago. The Too Hard to Keep archive was recently profiled on National Public Radio. He lives and works in Chicago and is represented by Andrew Rafacz

For project inquiries, email toohardtokeep@gmail.com