An LaBarre, Bonnie and Jody

Artist Caroline Vaughan American, 1949–2025

Date1973

MediumPhotography on paper

Dimensionsoverall: 8 3/4 × 11 3/4 in. (22.2 × 29.8 cm)
frame: 16 1/4 × 20 1/4 × 3/4 in. (41.3 × 51.4 × 1.9 cm)

ClassificationsPhotography

Credit LinePurchased with funds from the North Carolina State Art Society (Robert F. Phifer Bequest)

Object numberG.75.9.5

On View

Not on view

Label TextOver three decades, Caroline Vaughan has created a body of work, primarily in black-and-white, of impressive range and depth. Ranging from closeups of flowers to expansive landscapes, from intimate portraits to “psychological landscapes,” her all-encompassing eye depicts the most minute details with a precise clarity and a narrative sensibility—her images resonate with stories waiting to be told.

In Vaughan’s work, time often appears to have stopped, evidence of her ability to capture and freeze precise moments, to “borrow time” from both people and places. Her portraits are intimate, honest, and unsentimental—the subjects stare straight back at the viewer with a penetrating gaze that is hard to look away from. Her black-and-white “portraits” of flowers reveal the slightest nuances and changes in tone and surface, causing the petal of a flower to become as detailed and textured as human skin. Her landscapes often have a dreamlike or surreal quality, where bodies of water have an otherworldly presence and barren deserts are peopled with tiny nude figures. Stripped of superficiality, Vaughan’s images go bone-deep, to the core of people, places, and things.
[L. Dougherty, 2007]

ProvenanceCreated 1973; collection of the artist; sold to NCMA, 1975. Published ReferencesThirty-Sixth Annual North Carolina Artists Exhibition (exhibition catalogue) (Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of Art, 1973), cat. no. 125, illus. (b-w).

"Photographs from the Permanent Collection," North Carolina Museum of Art Preview (Winter 1988/89), mentioned 12 and 13.

Michele Natale, "Portrait of 10 artists of the lens," Raleigh: The News and Observer (September 10, 2006), mentioned 3G.

Alesia DiCosola, "N.C. Photography Exhibition Reopens with New Images," Preview: The Magazine of the North Carolina Museum of Art (November/December 2006), mentioned 11.
Exhibition HistoryRaleigh, NC, North Carolina Museum of Art, "Thirty-Sixth Annual North Carolina Artists Exhibition," November 14, 1973-January 13, 1974, cat. no. 125, illus. (b-w).

Raleigh, NC, North Carolina Museum of Art, "Photographs from the Permanent Collection," November 29, 1988-February 26, 1989.
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