Asheville Art Museum photography exhibit worth a look

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

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The Asheville Art Museum hasan intriguing photography exhibit that shows off early Asheville:

Ignatius Watsworth Brock (1866-1950) was a painter and poet, but he was best known as a photographer whose approach was clearly rooted in Pictorialism.

Brock was born in Comfort, NC, near Jacksonville, but as a young man traveled to New York City to study at Cooper Union Art Institute until he returned to his home state to work as a photographer in New Bern. In 1897, Brock married Ora Koonce and the two honeymooned in Asheville where the couple later relocated and he opened a studio in the Swananoa-Berkeley Hotel on Biltmore Avenue.

Brock’s photographs included staged painterly portraits, mountain landscapes and genre scenes marketed to tourists. In Brock’s work, we see Asheville of an earlier age through the eyes of a man who clearly loved to create images of the world around him.

There will be an opening reception Friday night. Check it.