Emma Brown in The Ramp Gallery

If her first camera was her eyes, Emma’s second camera was a big old digital camera with its batteries held in by black mechanical tape, which arrived about seven or eight years after her first one. Since then, there have been several black and silver SONYs and Canons, one Pentax film camera, a couple of phones, and one day, a DSLR. She goes through them embarrassingly fast, because she’s not gentle with them. They go in her pockets, every day, to school, to band practice, on airplanes, in rehearsals, on stages, to parties, in beds, on the edge of the bathtub.

If the eyes are the camera you might get to keep all your life, all the others are a way to share what the eyes capture. Emma takes photographs to give away her memories. What she chooses to show the world are memories she find particularly beautiful or important, and how she saw them in that moment. They include a few experiences that were exciting for everyone, and many that were mundane for most. The photograph has its limitations. But all it takes is for one pair of eyes to say – you should take a picture! – and everyone has the power to step into that memory with their own cameras.

Listen to the artist talk about their work in their own words:

About Emma Brown
Emma was born in Berkeley, California, but grew up in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania. Her wonderful parents only have themselves to blame for taking her to so many museums as a kid, because there was really nothing she was going to end up being other than an artist, in some way or another. In the mean time, she has sung, traveled, directed an a cappella group, and danced whenever possible. Last summer, she interned at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley and lay on the grass in Dolores Park. She is now a rising senior art major, music minor, at Kenyon College of Ohio, where there are beautiful trees and many bright, confused young people to photograph.

About The Ramp Gallery
The Ramp Gallery accepts exhibition proposals on a continual basis. Submission Guidelines can be found here. To purchase work on display or for more information email [email protected]. You can visit The Ramp gallery any time SOMArts Cultural Center is open.

Image credit: Emma Brown, Loitering, Digital print. 2015