Alice Laurenson: Connections & Reflections

January 8-18, 2025

Join Alice and Professor Kevin Buterbaugh on Thursday, January 16th at 6pm for an exhibition-related lecture on the civil war in Sudan: details

This exhibition is presented in collaboration with the New Canaan Library exhibition “My Story Revealed: The Art of Global Culture & Identity”, curated by Creative Connections.

By capturing images of children and adults in daily life in Asia, Africa, and South America, Branford photographer Alice Laurenson offers a stunning display of the universal bonds that connect us all. 

“I’ve always loved photography and believed in its power to influence, inspire, and motivate, as well as delight and entertain. Now, I’m using my own images to focus attention on our common humanity,” says Alice. 

Large color images represent people she’s encountered during the last 20 years of her career as a tour manager with an educational tours travel organization focused on archaeology, history, and culture. “I’ve always been interested in people’s faces—I look for interesting faces—and I’ve been lucky that these people allowed me to put them in focus,” says Alice. Even if she didn’t  know their language, a bit of pantomime to request their permission would usually be enough to allow Alice to capture the shot. 

“Early on, I learned that we don’t need to speak the same language to communicate and connect,” she says. “That’s what I came away with very early on, that we are all one. It’s so very important for us to always remember that, especially now,” says Alice. 

Alice shares her view of the beauty found in people while working, playing, and otherwise living their lives. She freezes in time extraordinary moments in the ordinary: a woman in Kashgar in Xinjiang, China tending to buckets of sudsy laundry on the sidewalk; a woman cooking with calabash bowls in her earthen-walled kitchen in Mali, West Africa; a man in the same village painstakingly deconstructing a woven plastic  feedbag and braiding the strands into strong, heavy rope. 

“Mali, West Africa is one of my favorite places in the world,” says Alice. “It’s one of the places I felt most at home.” 

Alice also feels privileged to have traveled to Syria in the years prior to the armed conflict  uprising against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which began in 2011. In  one photo on display, a young Syrian girl peers back at Alice. “I just loved her face. She’s a schoolgirl in a very, very small village in Syria. We were there  to see the ruins, and I just saw her,” says Alice. 

Pointing to the girl’s rumpled beige coat with a distinct silhouette of a man as its chest  emblem, Alice notes, “I had this photo for years before I realized what I was looking at.  That’s the former President Assad on her uniform.” 

From a visit to remote Kashgar in Xinjiang, China, Alice brought back an extraordinary image of three Uyghurs boys fooling around, “Kashgar Trio.” The photo is from a time prior to China’s repression and human rights violations of Uyghurs, Alice notes, as she wonders  aloud about the fate of the three. 

“I loved those three guys,” says Alice. “It was a rainy, muddy day, and they were really  mugging for the camera. I have many photos of children doing that, and eventually, I would like to put those photos together for a display, as well.”