Blue-chip gallery Locks has periodic photo exhibits. So do galleries such as LG Tripp, which closed its fourth-annual abstract photography show last week, and the Print Center, which opens its 86th annual international competition in photography in June. Museums are showcasing photography, too.
What's more, according to Perloff, young artists are staying here instead of moving to New York or the West Coast, where the fashion and music industries historically provided more jobs. Those industries have changed. Digital photo tools have made photography at once cheaper to work with and more specialized.
"It's a hard time to get a job as a photographer," said Sarah Stolfa, founder of the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center in Kensington. Stolfa launched PPAC in 2009 after earning a master of fine arts at Yale School of Art. Tired of running up to New York, she created the digital lab so she and other photographers could scan, print and work within a local, like-minded community. Stolfa, like many photographers around here, also teaches photography, at PPAC and at the University of Pennsylvania.
PPAC is a nonprofit arts center with classes, lectures, movie screenings, a book fair, an exhibition gallery and the closest thing the city has to an annual photo festival. On Philly Photo Day,anyone can take a photo in the city; PPAC prints and displays them during a two-week exhibition.
What the city needs now is an international festival to brand it as a photography hub and bring together artists, collectors, scholars and gallerists, said Martin McNamara. With partner Tom Callan, he founded the commercial photo space Gallery 339 in 2005.
