Waterlily Celebration, June 3, 1973

Artist Caroline Vaughan American, 1949–2025

Date1973

MediumGelatin-silver print

DimensionsImage: 11 1/4 x 8 7/8 in. (28.6 x 22.5 cm)

ClassificationsPhotography

Credit LinePurchased with funds from the William R. Roberson Jr. and Frances M. Roberson Endowed Fund for North Carolina Art, and partial gift of the artist

Object number2004.11.15

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 (and partial gift of the artist), 2004.Published ReferencesBorrowed Time: Photographs by Caroline Vaughan (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), illus. pl. 77.
Exhibition HistoryRaleigh, NC, North Carolina Museum of Art, "Contemporary NC Photography from the Museum's Collection," (part 2) November 19, 2006-February 18, 2007.

Winston-Salem, NC, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), "Contemporary North Carolina Photographs from the North Carolina Museum of Art," October 28, 2007-March 2, 2008.

Raleigh, NC, North Carolina Museum of Art, “Close to Home,” February 14–August 10, 2014.
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