The exhibition Chester Higgins: The Indelible Spirit at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery charts the early course of Higgins’s journey from the late 1960s through the 1990s with a selection of images that highlight his career from his beginnings as a talented student living in Alabama, through his early years in New York, and his travels to Senegal and Ghana.
Higgins photographs people of all generations–children looking tentatively out at the world; young adults full of strength and vitality; and elders, whose wisdom he evokes in quiet, peaceful circumstances. Whether at rest, work, or in social situations, alone, or with family, friends, and lovers, Higgins’s work reflects his respect for moments of deep contemplation. Through light, composition and a superb attentiveness to the flow of life, he creates images in which the sheer beauty of light and form conjure the magical spirit of an individual or group.
Higgins often shoots into the light. In some cases the contrasts between light and form become silhouettes in which the details of his subject are obscured and the essence of the moment revealed. At other times Higgins focuses on the sculptural form of a figure, on its texture emphasized and enveloped in light and shadow. Whether taking a close up or distanced view, focusing on detail or general form, it is the energy and spirit in his photographs that are most distinctive. Higgins finds the moment that lies between the physical and the spiritual. This is the profound and sweet spot in his photographs, the moment when something unexplainable opens up–an indelible spirit in his work that cannot be erased.