Jenee Mateer, “Best Western Plus, Bensalem PA” and “Holiday Inn Express”, Archival pigment prints
Beyond the Perspective of What You See at The Delaware Contemporary features images that move beyond the traditional associations of travel photography. The photographers included in this exhibition are Sally Canzoneri, Alexandra Duprey, Steven Edson, Prescott Moore Lassman, Jenee Mateer, Matt Mele, Melissa Sutherland Moss, JP Terlizzi, Ioannis Vastarkous, and Ava Hassinger.
From the museum and the curator, Erica Zoe Loustau about the exhibition:
Travel photography has long shaped how we imagine people, place, culture, memory, and movement. From postcards and tourism campaigns to personal archives and documentary work, the camera has acted as both witness and translator – always framing the world through perspective, longing, bias, and power.
This exhibition brings together artists who challenge traditional ideas of travel photography. Rather than romanticizing escape or reducing places to aesthetic backdrops, the work asks harder questions: What does it mean to “capture” a place? Who moves freely, and who cannot? How do tourism, migration, displacement, colonialism, climate change, labor, and globalization shape the ways people and stories travel? And what responsibilities do photographers hold toward the communities they depict?
We welcomed reflective, experimental, documentary, conceptual, intimate, poetic, or confrontational work. Artists selected for the exhibition explore personal journeys, inherited histories, diasporic identity, family migration stories, pilgrimage, borders, tourism economies, environmental change, cultural preservation, and the emotional geography of place.
And from Jenee Mateer about her images for the exhibition (pictured above):
Most people have stayed in a hotel at least once in their lives. For some it’s a regular occurrence. Special occasions, work or vacations are just some of the reasons one might need a place to stay. For my family, the reason behind our travel was baseball. My son played in high school and in the summers leading to graduation.
I do not particularly like hotels. I often find that unless you are willing to spend a lot of money, they all look very similar. The quiet insides often reflect the outside. Hotels are often in deserted areas close to freeway off ramps. The insides are very similar-2 beds, innocuous art, a mini frig and microwave, a desk for ones laptop, neutral colors, a heating and cooling unit and strange views from the windows that one is unable to open; parking lots, chain stores and chain restaurants. I associate the hotels with everything I dislike about corporate America. The air within the room is stale and slightly antiseptic. The rooms are too hot or too cold. One feels that inside, you are both somewhere and nowhere between somewhere and home. From the window the outside looks surreal while the inside is familiar and not familiar.
The stress of playing baseball and the stress of watching baseball affect the player and the parents and I started to imagine the interior of the hotel rooms as not just my interior safe space but also the space where my family retreated to relax, regroup and release tension. At the same time as they provided respite from the stress of the games, the rooms amplified my discomfort at being away from home and over time suggested patterns similar to the endless patterns of actual play that are at once the same but different.
The spaces felt like the interior psychological space of my mind, and I started to wonder how others might feel in these spaces, what their stories might reveal about themselves or about the experience of being in this waystation between home and somewhere else.
This exhibition is on view until 2/28/27.