Taylor Erdman
In Motion Staff Writer
A lover of garage sales for the little bits of Florida’s history they hold, an acclaimed photographer and a professor with 30 years of teaching under his belt, Senior Professor Gary Monroe moves on to yet another chapter in his life at the end of the spring semester.
“It’s been a great ride and a great college,” Monroe says, reflecting on his career. “It’s great to see students come with a little and leave with a lot.”
In retirement, Monroe plans to continue his passion for photography and put writing on a back burner. But, luckily, the College won’t see that last of him just because he is not a fulltime faculty
member. Among his plans are to donate his free time to the school, be it through symposiums or as a guest speaker to classes in DSC’s photography program.
Both a published writer and photographer, Monroe came to Volusia County from Miami Beach, where he began his carefully crafted and critically acclaimed, “The Highwaymen: Florida’s African-American Landscape Painters,” and 11 other works about Florida art.
“The Highwaymen” depicts up-close and private moments with his subjects that inexperienced photographers might find uncomfortable. But Monroe describes the experience as an “organic and natural flow.” He says he goes into photo shoots, not seeing them as projects, but as a way of life. As an artist, he counsels students, “You have to embrace that the world’s not black and white.”
Monroe notes that the reason he teaches is to inform both the viewer and his students, to break them out of their ingrained beliefs and show them a more humanistic view.
When Monroe first started photography, he took it as “A realization of possibilities and a state of becoming.” Photographers, he says, must have tenacity and the ability to understand one’s own inclination and the inclinations of others.
In conjunction with his retirement, the Southeast Museum of Photography is presenting a special exhibition of his work. It runs through April 14 in the SMP at the Mori Hosseini Center on the main DSC campus. “Gary Monroe: Photographs” provides a glimpse into a number of communities even native Floridians might be unaware of. He covers everything from Old World Jews who populated South Beach, Miami and Haitian resettlement camps to the ubiquitous tourists visiting Disney and the very landscapes that Florida cities and communities are built upon.
The photographs vary widely and reflect more than 30 years’ of Monroe’s photographic pursuits. As a world traveler and art collector, Monroe also counts among his favorite destinations Haiti and Cuba. His large art collection contains fine examples from both Caribbean nations.
Along with photography, Monroe is an aficionado of “outsider” artwork and authored a fascinating 2003 book on that topic titled “Extraordinary Interpretations: Self-Taught Florida Artists.” He has lectured frequently on the subject, as well as the acclaimed Highwaymen painters of the 1940s and 1950s in Florida. His writing resurrected the careers of those African-American artists, many of whom died in obscurity before their rediscovery. Today, paintings they originally sold for a few dollars fetch thousands and are highly collectible.
Monroe attended graduate school at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in the late 1970s, then returned home to Miami Beach to photograph South Beach’s old world Jewish community daily for 10 years. With the Haitian boatlift of 1980, he received unprecedented permission to photograph refugees at the INS Krome Resettlement Camp, although the mainstream the media were barred. He ventured into Miami’s Little Haiti when others avoided the place and while the infamously corrupt “Baby Doc” Duvalier ruled, Monroe began photographing throughout the beleaguered country.
Because of his interest in tourism, in 1987 Monroe began photographing tourist attractions. He photographed Disney World hundreds of times in an attempt to make sense of its “rite of passage” and subsequently photographed Florida’s older theme parks. His interests then expanded to include other countries, Israel, England, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, Poland and India, to name a few.
Over the course of his long, multi-faceted career, he has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Dade County Council of the Arts and Sciences, Florida Humanities Council and the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, the Southeast College Art Conference and Fulbright Foundation.
For more information on Monroe’s exhibition, call 506-3350 or visit www.smponline.org