“Beauty awakens the soul to act” - Dante Alighieri

“I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied” - Julia Margaret Cameron

Inspired Portraits is an exhibition that was created as part of a project to develop a significant collaborative cultural exchange between Long Island photographers Bernice Halpern Cutler, AnnMarie Tornabene, Joan Harrison, Carol Huebner Venezia, Susan Dooley, Joan Powers, Ann Chatsky and Susan Kravitz and The Julia Margaret Cameron Trust.

The photographers include Joan Powers, Carol Venezia and Joan Harrison who are senior faculty members of the art department at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University in Brookville, Long Island, NY, Susan Kravitz and Susan Dooley who are L.I.U alumni and respectively Dean and Art Department Chairperson at Nassau Community College, Garden City, NY, AnneMarie Tornabene who is an artist, drawing model and muse to the island art community, and Ann Chwatsky who teaches at New York University and is Chairperson of the North Eastern division of the Society for Photographic Education.

“There is no image as beautiful or compelling as that of the human face. The eight photographers in this exhibition approach the portrayal of the human countenance from eight varied perspectives. They photograph total strangers, friends and acquaintances, their progeny and themselves. They work at home, in the studio and in the street using every format camera from view to pinhole. What is most interesting, from a curatorial perspective, is that the photographers themselves are colleagues and friends who have worked together, studied with some of the same mentors and, in several cases mentored each other, and yet, have developed such different points of view. The vision they have in common is that each is mesmerized by the portrait and has been inspired to share, with you the viewer, the intimacy of one person seeing another” – Professor Joan Harrison, Curator of Hillwood Art Museum.