Judy Gelles
(Somersworth, New Hampshire, 1944 - 2020, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
American
Mobile Home #10 may look staged or artificial, but it shows a real location: Leisure Living Estates, a mobile home retirement community in Melbourne Beach, Florida, where Judy Gelles would visit her parents each January. The residents would get to bed by 8 p.m., leaving Gelles with an opportunity to photograph empty streets and driveways in the dark of night. Using a tripod, she took between two and five minutes to make her exposures on color film, which produced blue-toned pictures from the nighttime conditions.
Gelles (née Isacoff) graduated from Boston University in 1965 with a Bachelor in Science, and went on to receive an MEd in Counseling from the University of Miami in 1968. She took a photography course at the University of Rhode Island, initially hoping just to make a “perfect baby portrait,” and from there went on to expand her artistic goals and vision. She attended Rhode Island School of Design and received her MFA in 1991, later moving to Philadelphia in the late 1990s, where she was able to find new opportunities to display her artwork and continue extensively documenting family and domestic life. Her photography has been exhibited extensively nationally and internationally, and her work is in the collection of RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Harvard University Fine Arts Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California.