A retro ’spective

Every budding or wannabe artist may have a moment when he or she looks at his or her early work, like that primitive preschool scribble displayed on the gallery of Mom’s refrigerator, and thinks, “Better hold on to this—a gallery might want it for my retrospective one day.”

That makes Richard Breedon’s Shimo Center for the Arts photography exhibition 1979 sound like a bit of a dream come true. While not accurate to describe his photos as, well, “preschool scribble,” his early work shows the perspective of a nascent professional photographer—who went on to get a Ph.D. in physics and work in labs in Europe and Japan, among other locales. Only those unbridled scribbled drawings on the fridge could not have predicted such an unexpected back story.