THE DRISKEL GALLERY

Adam Shemper photographs swimmers at a small lake in Mississippi and he seems to move invisibly among them with a detached ethnographers eye. His pictures subtly raise questions about race and class in the New South; bothblacks and whites
share the water, but in one photograph we see a large white woman and a small black girl in identical pink bathing suits; they are separated and staring at each other from either end of a long parking lot.

In Shemper's compositions the body is scrutinized and celebrated in all it’s varying shapes ,sizes colors and forms, while at the same time expressing a palpable tension and distrust that belies the idylls of a midsummer afternoon.