“Amy Blakemore: Photographs 1988–2008”

Curated by Alison de Lima Greene

Amy Blakemore’s photographs—of discarded shoes, gathering clouds, a child in a crowd—proffer open-ended narratives. That dreamlike opacity is augmented by her use of low-tech Diana cameras, which produce pictures with softly focused edges and blurred resolutions. The MFAH’s selection of thirty-six works from the past two decades—the artist’s first midcareer survey—tracks Blakemore’s transition from black-and-white to color, and considers how her casual snapshot aesthetic is married to a conceptual engagement with photography’s capacity to distort memory. The photographs are atmospheric in several senses: They capture a mood but also depict a hazy quality of light that feels related to the distinctively viscous air of Houston, where Blakemore has lived since 1985. A catalogue featuring essays by Alison de Lima Greene, Whitney curator Chrissie Iles, and others accompanies the show.