Penelope Umbrico: Sunset Portraits from 13,243,857 Sunset Pictures on Flickr 10/8/13
March 5, 2025 – May 25, 2025
Penelope Umbrico (b. 1957, Philadelphia, PA) uses photo-sharing and consumer-to-consumer websites, mail-order catalogues, and image archives as expansive resources to create installations, video, and digital media works. Sifting through images on the internet using search engines for subjects like TV screens, mirrors, sunsets, and the moon, her work explores the production and consumption of images—and individual and collective identities—with attention to the technologies that both shape and are shaped by these forces.
One of Umbrico’s most iconic works, Sunset Portraits from 13,243,857 Sunset Pictures on Flickr 10/8/13 (2013), is a series of appropriated photographs capturing people standing in front of sunsets, sourced from Flickr (once considered one of the largest photo-sharing websites), a project she began in 2010. At that time, camera technology prioritized exposing for the brightness of the sun, often rendering the individuals in the foreground as silhouettes, thereby erasing the subjectivity of the individual.
Installed at the Yvonne de C Segerstrom Gallery at OCMA, Umbrico’s Sunset Portraits contemplates the flood of images in contemporary life while offering a meditation on collective experience through a universal theme. In an era that emphasizes individuality and highlights differences, while often finding conflict in those distinctions, the work presents a strikingly tranquil vision. Like the silhouettes in Umbrico’s work, we find ourselves in a state of solitude while simultaneously sharing in the wonder that unites us all.