Miami Photo Fest Presents
Peggy Nolan
Tales of a Badass Grandma
Miami Photo Fest is pleased to team up with Daylight Books who will be presenting one of their latest release by Peggy Nolan. The artist will be on hand for an intimate presentation, to answer questions, sign and dedicate their published works.
Tales of a Badass Grandma is the result of many decades of photographs recording the day-to-day workings of a large family.
This book describes how a very large family and their many partners and offspring get through the day.
here are babies being pushed out and food being cooked and dreamers staring at the ceiling. There are empty beds in good light. This is how Peggy Nolan sees the folks she loves and sometimes not even like so much. She has been looking at them through her view finder since most of them were small and has followed them around mosh pits and hangouts and fights with their boyfriends and girlfriends. Nolan was driven to witness all of it and leave behind a record of what it looked and felt like to be them.
As Chris Wiley of the New Yorker says “There is a tenderness and a sensitivity in these pictures of family that cannot be faked. Nolan is not embedded with her subjects, she is entwined. As such, the pictures not only show that she has an eye, but also a heart.”
In the early 1980s, when Peggy Nolan's youngest child was around three, her father gave her a 35mm Olympus camera to take pictures of his grandchildren. From her first shot, Nolan was hooked. She spent several decades honing her skills as a photographer, documenting her growing brood in black and white film which she developed in her laundry room turned darkroom. The photographs were made into family albums but never shared with the general public.
Daylight is a nonprofit organization dedicated to publishing art and photography books. By exploring the documentary mode along with the more conceptual concerns of fine art, Daylight’s uniquely collectible publications work to revitalize the relationship between art, photography, and the world at large.