CAW Announces INTERLUDES: A Deborah Tenney Retrospective June 18 – July 31, 2025

New Haven, CT: We are pleased to announce INTERLUDES: A Deborah Tenney Retrospective, celebrating the life and photography of Deborah Tenney (1944-2020) running from June 18 - July 31, 2025 at the Creative Arts Workshop in New Haven, 80 Audubon St., New Haven CT 06510. Opening Reception is on Friday, June 20, from 5 to 7pm.

Deborah Tenney, a Hamden resident, was a Lecturer at Yale’s Department of English, who taught ESL and was a Writing Tutor at Morse College and Yale School of Management, and was a long-time photography student and supporter of the Creative Arts Workshop.

Wherever she travelled, Deborah Tenney brought her camera with her: on her visits to Paris, Sydney or Prague, or hiking around Lake Whitney and East Rock in Connecticut, she was drawn to the quiet moments of the side streets, shop windows, doorways, deserted pathways, empty beaches and lake shores captured on the urban streets and in rural landscapes.

Her passion for Photography was sparked by her father’s gift of a 35mm camera when she was in high school. From then on she was a devoted to film photography; honing her craft at CAW and creating silver gelatin prints in the serenity of the darkroom with the mentorship of instructors like Harold Shapiro, Marianne Bernstein, Joan Fitzsimmons, and Phyllis Crowley.

Proceeds from the sale of the art in the exhibition INTERLUDES: A Deborah Tenney Retrospective will be donated to Doctors Without Borders at the request of the family.

In her own words:

"Becoming a photographer changes the way one sees... I love the entire process: Finding what I want to photograph - waiting for the light to be perfect, deciding on the point of view;

Developing the negatives - the suspense of finally opening the tank and seeing images - sliding the long reel between my fingers to clean the film of excess water before hanging it to dry; Printing the negative - agitating the print in the developer and watching an image appear like magic." – Deborah Tenney, 2014