The Asheville Art Museum’s Visions + Visionaries: Pop Art Gala on June 21 will feature an exciting live auction offering a variety of fine art and vacation packages.
They’re spotlighting the brilliant work of local photographer Ralph Burns. These two evocative photographs are up for auction at the Gala as a pair and are both matted and framed.
The Flambeaux Carrier photograph is the signature image for Ralph’s current exhibition at the Asheville Art Museum.
Ralph Burns has long been recognized as a documentary photographer whose images have captured the diverse and enigmatic nature of ritual and religion, and who has explored the subjective and often defining nature of belief, worship and culture. Like his predecessors — such as Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark and Robert Frank — Burns uses his cameras to probe a constantly shifting human landscape and to document the public and private aspects of culture and religion in transition, often working at the unclear and overlapping intersection of both. Throughout his career Burns has displayed a continuous and persistent interest in the motivations for worship and ritual while maintaining a compassionate and non-judgmental intimacy with his subjects. He has photographed both collective and individualized manifestations of what he sees as a seemingly irrepressible human need to ritualize loss, love and death, and to formally externalize and codify hope and the desire for transcendence.