Through Ivan’s Eye Series
Returning home in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Ivan (11-12 September 2004) writer and photographer Gretchen Allen found her worldly treasures submerged in the floodwaters of the Category 5 storm. Her life’s work had been all but destroyed, including her extensive photographic archive. Placing the damaged slides in a container and storing them away, Allen would later revisit this photographic “Pandora’s Box”, only to discover that the damage caused by exposure to saltwater had in fact created unintentionally beautiful abstractions. “These images are here transformed, transmogrified,” says the artist. “They now are Ivan’s works, no longer mine.”
About the Artist
Gretchen Allen
1944–2019
Gretchen Allen, who lived in Cayman for 35 years, was an award-winning multimedia journalist, a radio and television broadcaster, a newspaper reporter and editor, a photographer, the Governor’s Social Secretary, as well as an actress and a jazz singer. Her diverse career included time as a correspondent for the Associated Press and numerous newspapers and magazines, covering an array of topics including food, wine, travel, major sporting events, and celebrity interviews. She served as an editor of United Nations documentation, worked for a renowned shark research laboratory in her hometown of Sarasota, Florida, and taught writing in the artists’ colony of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Her photographs were shown at NGCI in the exhibition Through Ivan’s Eye in 2018 and in Cayman Brac in 2019, along with a recent feature in The Ties that Bind (2022).
