The Photographs of Angela Orrell

Angela Orrell is a citizen of multiple communities, and these places live eternally in her photographs. Her images aptly reflect her academic and professional background, which includes a degree in nursing and study in fine arts. The result is a vision that combines photography’s capacity for scientific accuracy and healing beauty. In her native coastal New York, her adopted rural Virginia home, and neighboring Southern Cities in transition, Angela Orrell has used the visual image to honor and preserve the stories of changing American communities.

The immediacy and visual richness of Angela Orrell’s photographs give them the power to serve as portals to other places. Often, those places hover in that poetic space between past and present. Training her lens on communities whose ways of life were once commonplace, Orrell’s images beguile the viewer’s sense of time. Silvery images of a venerable local diner, a final tobacco auction, the family-owned barbershop, or fishermen returning with the day’s catch feel archaic and distinctly American. In their details, we discover a bygone era and are surprised to learn that they are, in fact, contemporary documentations of the vanishing present.

Her pictures grow out of deep and carefully tended relationships with the communities she photographs and are often presented in conjunction with oral histories, objects, and video footage she collects. In this way, her images form part of a complex portrait that preserves and pays tribute to old ways of life and the people who allow them to live on. Although at times the subjects for her photographs are often plain and careworn, their beauty is revealed at every turn: the dance of light across a chrome surface in a diner, the mix of textures on aging faces and hands, the furrows left behind in busy fields all demand our notice and our awe.

In a world that assaults us daily with literally thousands of retouched, enhanced, and “cleaned up” images, we are reminded of the uniqueness of the natural and the honest. Angela Orrell’s photographs invite us to look at old ways of life with fresh eyes. In the process, we are reminded of the words of an even older poem:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know

1 John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” 1819

Rebecca Jones Senior Editor and Writer The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts