Mariemont Alumnus, Local Artist Timothy Harrier Displays Rarely Seen OTR Photos and More in Two Fotofocus Exhibitions

“OTR, 1973” – Photos by Timothy Harrier

In 1973, Mariemont Alumnus Timothy Harrier walked the streets of Over-the-Rhine with a Nikon camera and captured what Cincinnati looked like at that time. These photographs, depicting people living their everyday lives in OTR and Harrier’s contemporary meditation on Harriet Tubman, memory, and freedom, will be presented in two Cincinnati Fotofocus exhibitions this month.

Harrier is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice moves across photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, and film. His work will be included in the following exhibitions;

“Harriet Tubman — The Journey to Freedom”

(Featured in Fotofocus Biennial: “Art of the Chase”)

Art Beyond Boundaries: 1410 Main St., Cincinnati | Now – Oct. 3 | View the art here

The series approaches Tubman not as a distant historical monument but through ideas of passage, secrecy, danger, memory, and return. Using photography alongside charcoal, ash, graphite, soot, and organic materials, Harrier constructs images in which figures emerge from darkness and landscape. At the center is Tubman’s radical understanding of freedom: not simply escaping bondage herself, but repeatedly returning to guide others toward it.

“OTR (Over-the-Rhine), 1973”

(Featured in Fotofocus Biennial: “Waiting to Be Seen”) 

Eisele Fine Art Gallery: 2838 Observatory Ave., Hyde Park

Opening Reception: Thursday, October 8, from 6–9 p.m. | Runs Oct. 8 – Oct. 31, 2026

View the art here

This exhibition brings Harrier’s work into conversation with photographs by Maureen France, Melvin Grier, Maurice Mattei, William Messer, Robby Parsons, Ave Pildas, Rachel Rampleman, Brad Smith, Michael Wilson, and Matthew Zory. Harrier made the photographs in a studio in the former St. Paul’s Catholic girls’ school on Spring Street. He repeatedly walked Over-the-Rhine and neighboring Pendleton, photographing children, families, storefronts, stoops, sidewalks, and the ordinary choreography of street life.

Working with Pan-X and Tri-X film, Harrier made pictures that were notable, not for spectacle, but for sustained attention. His subjects are not presented as emblems of poverty, urban decline, or social history. They remain stubbornly individual: curious, guarded, amused, self-possessed, sometimes looking directly back at the person behind the camera. That restraint is what gives the photographs their contemporary charge.

More than fifty years later, these are not simply records of what Cincinnati once looked like. They show how people occupied the city—how a doorway could become a social space, how a sidewalk could hold a small drama, and how a glance caught for a fraction of a second could survive for decades.

“OTR, 1973” asks viewers to encounter the past without the softening lens of nostalgia. The neighborhood has changed enormously. The photographs have not. Their immediacy lies in Harrier’s willingness to let people retain their complexity. 

Seen together, the two FotoFocus presentations reveal the continuity in Harrier’s work. Whether photographing Cincinnati streets in 1973 or engaging the historical presence of Harriet Tubman today, he returns to questions of who is visible, who is remembered, and what an image can preserve that history alone cannot.

The exhibitions arrive during an especially active period for Harrier. His recent national and international presentations have included Artsy International, Cincinnati Art Academy, Bastille Design Center in Paris, Moremen Gallery in Louisville, The Contemporary Dayton, and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, among others.

For a photographer who began making these Cincinnati images more than fifty years ago, FotoFocus does something unusually valuable: it allows the early work to enter the present tense.

The people in “OTR, 1973” are no longer simply figures from Cincinnati’s past. They are still looking back.

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Exhibition Information:

“Art of the Chase”, FotoFocus Biennial (Featuring “Harriet Tubman — The Journey to Freedom”)

NOW – Oct. 3, 2026  | Art Beyond Boundaries, 1410 Main St., Cincinnati

More Info: https://www.artbeyondboundaries.com/upcoming/fotofocus%3A-art-of-the-chase

“Waiting to Be Seen”, FotoFocus Biennial (Featuring “OTR, 1973”)

Thursday, October 8, 6–9 p.m. (Opening Reception) | Exhibition runs Oct. 8 – Oct. 31, 2026

Eisele Fine Art Gallery: 2838 Observatory Ave., Hyde Park

More Info: https://www.eiselegallery.com/