The Photographer’s Green Book

A collaboration between Jay Simple, Sydney Ellison, Ally Caple, and Zora J Murff, the core members of The Photographer’s Green Book.

June 24, 2022 - August 27, 2022

Founded in 2020, the Photographer’s Green Book (PGB) follows in the tradition of the Negro Motorist Greenbook. It started as a list of resources to navigate the photographic community, which has historically denied the voices of those other than predominantly white cis male artists, and the work has expanded on the original Green Book’s target audience to include other individuals whose voices have been under-supported or underrepresented in academic and arts institutions. 

Their summer exhibition at Visible Records will be the first introduction of PGB to Charlottesville and the surrounding area, as well as their first opportunity to show their work together as artists and collaborators. The exhibition, featuring the four core members of PGB, Jay Simple, Sydney Ellison, Ally Caple, and Zora J Murff, will include recent individual works, highlight the places where their practices and processes intersect and overlap, and showcase how their individual practices influence their ongoing work as the Photographer’s Green Book. 

Within each of their four practices, they actively think about history, visibility, and labor at the intersection of American identity as People of the Global Majority. Points of Departure is a multi-disciplinary exhibition featuring photographs, collages, publications, sculptures, and studio notes made between New York, Philadelphia, and Arkansas, many of which utilize archival materials and pop culture and media references