In Good Time, photographs by Doug DuBois

Doug DuBois approaches his work slowly and engages in long-term photographic projects. He tells stories that reveal both a profound humanity and the inexorable passing of time. The Hermès Foundation and Aperture Foundation are pleased to present the exhibition In Good Time, the first mid-career survey of DuBois’ photographs, curated by Cory Jacobs. This retrospective contains three different bodies of work: All the Days and Nights, Avella, and My Last Day at Seventeen.

Family is a recurring theme in DuBois’ work, and his first project on the subject, All the Days and Nights, took over twenty years to complete. In 1984, DuBois began photographing his own family, tracing the complicated and nuanced relationships that unfolded as time passed and events transpired, such as his father’s near-fatal accident, subsequent recovery, and the impact on his family.

For his series Avella, DuBois spent years photographing the residents of an old coal-mining town in Pennsylvania where his grandmother had lived. He collected her stories and made a portrait of the inhabitants of an American town past its prime.

In his most recent series, My Last Day at Seventeen, DuBois traveled to Cobh, Ireland, where he was an artist-in-residence at the Sirius Arts Centre. What started as a month-long residency turned into a five-year project for DuBois, who was fascinated by the complex connections between the teenagers in the insular neighborhood of Russell Heights. He began photographing them, and earned their trust, in order to tell a coming-of-age story about the delicate moment between childhood and adulthood, filled with both confidence and uncertainty.

Some of DuBois’ photographs are candid; most often he orchestrates scenes, engaging the narrative languages of cinema and literature to give access to the truth and complexity of lived experience.

About the Hermès Foundation’s alliance with Aperture Foundation
In 2014, the Hermès Foundation launched a program of photographers’ residencies and exchanges, exhibitions, and publications with Aperture Foundation in New York. The program marks the Hermès Foundation’s renewed commitment to intervening upstream in the creative process, with support for the production of new photographic work, and a new partnership with a distinguished, internationally acclaimed photography institution.

About the Hermès Foundation
The Hermès Foundation supports people and organizations seeking to learn, perfect, transmit, and celebrate the skills and creativity that shape and inspire our lives today, into the future. Guided by our central focus on artisan expertise and creative artistry in the context of society’s changing needs, the Foundation’s activities explore two complementary avenues: know-how and creativity, know-how and the transmission of skills.

The Foundation develops its own programs in the contemporary visual arts (exhibitions and artists’ residencies), photography (Immersion, in alliance with Aperture Foundation), performing arts (New Settings), design (the Prix Émile Hermès), and craftsmanship (the Skills Academy), together with international calls for projects promoting biodiversity and solidarity. At the same time, we support the activities of organizations in these areas around the world.

The Foundation’s unique, diverse activities are governed by a single, over-arching belief: Our gestures define us.

Aperture’s exhibitions are funded in part by an award from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Charina Endowment Fund.