“STEPHANIE”: The Arts Council of Princeton presents “Traces of Time,” an exhibition by Princeton-based photographer Eileen Hohmuth-Lemonick, January 8 through February 5.

The Arts Council of Princeton presents “Traces of Time,” an exhibition by Princeton-based photographer Eileen Hohmuth Lemonick, January 8 through February 5, 2022.

“Traces of Time” addresses a lifetime of memories, love, sexuality, family, beauty, decay, fragility, longevity, vulnerability, sickness, health, and death. It has to do with moments and people that are gone. The project started when Hohmuth-Lemonick fractured her pelvis, was immobile, and could only get around with a walker. Friends sent bouquets, and with severely limited motion, she began to photograph them on her kitchen table, finding beauty in their decay. From that initial work, she has continued in many directions: among them portraits, flowers frozen in melting ice, images created with a scanner, combining live and dead flowers, painting on vegetation, and observing the passage of time in nature.

For many years, Hohmuth-Lemonick specialized in documentary and portrait photography, focusing on people who live in developing countries and who face challenges many in the developed world can’t easily imagine. In the fall of 2006, she traveled to Uganda to photograph one group of children orphaned by AIDS and another undergoing rehabilitation after having served as child soldiers in the revolutionary army trying to overthrow the government.

In 2008, she and journalist Christine Gorman documented nurses and health care in Malawi. Hohmuth-Lemonick has also documented the experience of blindness all over the world, traveling to China, Guatemala, Mexico, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Armenia, Zimbabwe, Nepal, India, and the Brazilian Amazon to show how the sightless live in very different kinds of societies.

Among her other projects have been a photographic essay on aging, part of a major exhibition at the Franklin Institute, in Philadelphia; a five-page spread in People magazine on the 50th reunion of Holocaust survivors who remained in Germany for several years after the war; and a photo essay on the mummies of Guanajuato, Mexico.

Hohmuth-Lemonick’s work has been supported by many nonprofit organizations including World Vision, Helen Keller International, the International Eye Foundation, and the Seva Foundation. It has also been recognized with several awards, including a Fellowship in Photography from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts; a Village Voice Documentary Photography Grant; and a Visual Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Arts Council of Princeton is located at 102 Witherspoon Street. Gallery hours are Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; and Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Free admission. For more information, visit artscouncilofprinceton.org.