A Peculiar Paradise

Nathan Benn's exhibition, A Peculiar Paradise, opened at HistoryMiami Museum in November 2018 and ran through April 2019. This collection of photographs interprets Benn's home state at the dawn of the 1980s, a time when Florida's only true constant was change. Although some regions rested like the state's alligators, staid and satisfied, other areas became a hotbed for the narcotics trade and a hub for Caribbean and South American immigration. Benn captures this increasing cultural diversity and the state's innate peculiarity with the keen sense of an anthropologist and the glint-in-the-eye of a local.

The pictures, fittingly, sometimes feel urgent, sometimes leisurely. Kodachrome film's distinctive color palette, boosting warm colors and muting cool color, seems tailor-made to its purpose here, displayed to full effect with expressive composition and sumptuous texture. The combined effect of images by Nathan Benn of his home state with charming anecdotes creates a delightfully vivid, passionate, and subjective look at what adds up to a love letter to the Sunshine State.

The book A Peculiar Paradise is a 200-page volume of Nathan Benn's Florida photographs published by powerHouse Books.

“With a uniquely American mix of formality and ease, and a color palette so tart you can almost taste it, Benn makes the past vividly — even painfully — present.” — Vince Aletti, Photography Critic, The New Yorker

“The seeming inconsequential subject of Benn's photographs - which are keenly observed and evocative of a time and place - act as metaphors for American culture and values. Although much of Benn's work was done for a magazine and not gallery walls, his use of color throughout holds its own with artists of the period such as William Eggleston and Stephen Shore.” — Richard Buckley, Former Editor, Women's Wear Daily, Vogue Hommes International

Book: A Peculiar Paradise

When

November 9, 2018

Where

Leica Store Miami, 372 Miracle Mile, Coral Gables