In April, member photographer, Frank Francis shares his private view of Southeast Asia through a series of story telling images, which are both emotionally compelling and stunning in composition. His process includes seeking out remote places, which provide access to people who are not so much a part of our modern digital world, who therefore tend to react differently to the camera. He finds capturing the right moment easier when people have been minimally exposed to other photographers.
Frank Francis says, “My goal is to seek lives within lives, the undertones, the fragments of lives bathed in mystery—an exceedingly difficult task. Another goal is to combine light, composition and moment to tell a story with truth and some drama in it. The long trips on waterways in Assam, Bangladesh, and Myanmar have allowed a silent platform to witness the unchanged rhythms of lives where daily tasks can take on memorable beauty enhanced by the water and the sky. Another goal has been to photograph the intensity and beauty of spiritual life often amplified by transcendence and symbolism.”
Kendall Isotalo’s body of work Quietude examines the emotional space that can occur during a time when a perceived threat of loss and transition coexists with feelings of gratitude and hope. She has found that in his attempts to be fully present and aware, she is able to experience profound moments of stillness, quiet, and tranquility.
Sara Friedlander has created a series of three-dimensional mixed media visual narratives to honor courageous women, who left their homeland and their families, often under great duress, and traveled to America to start a new life. Most of them spoke no English; holding steadfast to their hopes for a brighter future, they faced daunting challenges in order to establish themselves in this new world. She has collected vintage portraits as well as images in the public domain (taken either in photographic studios or on the street during the first quarter of the 1900's) and then, using Photoshop, digitally combined them with her own photographs (landscapes, birds, trees, architecture) and tied them together with paint.
Jan Manzi enjoys photographing a range of man-made and natural subjects — often abstracting or isolating them in a way to bring attention to things that might not ordinarily be noticed. As she says, “I find myself responding to the wonderful play of light and shadow that can transform the appearance of a building, a forgotten object, a plant, or a rock.” Sometimes the results are a bit quirky, which can cause viewers to say “what is that?”… followed by surprise at how there can be a quiet beauty in so much that surrounds them, if they only take a little time to look and see.
Street photographers Casey LeClair and John Hernandez share the Main Gallery for this candid and striking exhibit of street photography. Casey’s images are in black and white, contrasted by John's color photos. Together they provide a broad spectrum of what street photography can be. Each photographer has a distinct style and way of looking at their surroundings. From the ironic to the gritty, this exhibit offers a slice of reality from two distinctly different viewpoints.
Mark Coggins is both an author and photographer. His images have been used to illustrate his own novels as well as the books of other writers, notably Patricia Cornwell’s Red Mist (end papers) and Roland Barthes’s A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (cover photograph). Most of his photographs are street scenes from cities throughout the world. “I seek to capture people interacting or engaged in a representative activity,” he says. “I hope my work conveys the energy, communal bonds, and in some cases, inherent mystery and alienation of urban life.”
The term that most accurately describes Don Manderson’s current work is Simultaneity. This refers to the simultaneous and insistent nature of the daily sensory experience in an increasingly technical society. This phenomenon is exemplified by society’s constant efforts to leverage the human capacity for concurrent processing of a range of sensory stimuli within social interaction, advertising, entertainment and journalism. Simultaneity is employed in Don's digital montage and video pieces for delivery of personal commentary and aesthetic expression in a manner congruent with the observer’s daily sensory experience.
Utility wires span fields where a neighborhood disappeared. Gutters and garbage pile knee high in front of a burnt-out duplex. A fire hydrant serves a lonely house on a city block. The residential streets of Detroit are in the midst of rapid change with no end in sight. At night, photographer Bill Schwab travels areas in a fast state of flux, finding large swathes of ruralization and deterioration against a backdrop of skies dramatic in color and mood. Street lights, porch lights, window lights, bridge lights, moonlight shine quietly. During the day, the most aggressive blight removal program in the nation bulldozes its way up and down the streets. In its tracks: ghosts of what was and a spirit that hangs on.
Hans Gindlesberger's exhibit I’m in the Wrong Film is a consideration of our troubled relationship to the marginal places that exist in the national landscape. The title of the series is a colloquialism used to indicate a speaker’s disorientation in regard to physical surroundings that have taken on a disconcerting, fictitious quality. In this series of staged and performative photographs, the experience of individual dislocation the phrase describes is applied more broadly, in articulating the collective loss of identity that permeates the rural and post-industrial landscape of America.
Saying “hola” (‘greetings’ in Spanish) causes your face muscles to move upward in an openly welcoming manner. “Baja” is the land of the beating sun where dust clings to your body like a cheap price sticker and the colors vibrate to distract you from the surrounding hardships. Ingrid Lundquist’s images capture the inner strength of the people as they go about their daily lives, under challenging circumstances, in a less than pristine environment. Hola Baja speaks to the rich texture of this land and the spirit of its people
Probably for the majority of people the word warrior evokes images of the male gender. Yet throughout history women have been thrust into positions of leadership and conflict, rising to the challenge, either alongside men as equals, or in many cases, even better than their male counterparts. Generally it has been men who have written the histories of the world. The heroic actions of women, with rare exceptions, have been inadvertently or intentionally omitted or diminished.
The concept for Judy Yemma's project, Farm to Studio, is built on her interest in creating studio portraits of organic subjects. Flowers were first. Currently, her interest is in photographing plant-based edibles in unique and unexpected compositions. More than mere food items in the produce department or in her garden, she finds fruit and vegetables to be complex and beguiling. "When I look, I see their personalities. I see their relationships to human qualities. Fruits and vegetables have remarkable lines, color, texture, and character—offering possibilities for conveying emotional qualities (including humor) and for compositions out of the ordinary."
Malcolm Easton's project Keepsakes of Strangers derives from his visits to estate sales at homes of the recently deceased. He focuses on the humbler possessions left behind. These objects—typically stained, dusty or patched—carry hints of their connections to the everyday lives of their owners. Malcolm selects some of these things to be photographed. Working with natural light in his studio, he finds that illumination can bring new life to items that might otherwise seem outworn. He also explores juxtapositions that allow objects to relate to each other in unexpected ways. These inspirations lead him to create small monuments, temporary memorials to the people who handled these objects and kept them close for many years. Using sunlight reflected by a hand-held mirror, he photographs his subjects in isolation. In so doing he intends the images to have one foot in the world of light and another in the void. His intention is to address themes of loss and transformation.
At the age of 91, Francine Moskovitz looks back over her 40 years as an enthusiastic photographer and says, “My journey has been adventurous. I’ve gone from underwater cameras, to single lens reflexes, to digital cameras.” Her work has included painting and sandwiching slides, weaving photographs with Mylar, producing double images with a reflective glass pane, and presently, manipulating and combining digital images. This exhibit follows a photographer’s path from the 1970s to the present, with excerpts from numerous portfolios.
Helmut Schillinger: A Different View of Haiti
Cathy Summa-Wolfe: Hummingbirds: A Flash Ahead of Creation
Wildlife photographer Douglas Herr seeks partnership with the animals he photographs. He spends the time needed to allow an animal to become comfortable in his presence. This allows the animal to relax and often allows him to use use shorter lenses than are customary for wildlife photography. This in turn allows in the photograph a sense of the animal's preferred habitat. In the ideal photograph, the animal is fully aware of and comfortable with his presence.
In the past two decades, Adrienne Sher has divided her time, artistically, between photography and theatre. "I find that the two disciplines complement each other very well," she says. "Theater is verbal, collaborative and interactive with the public. Working in the darkroom or at the computer is quiet, solitary and meditative. I find the more I learn about photography, the more I exchange ideas and techniques with other photographers, the more engrossed I become, and passionate to learn more."
The title of Mark Howell’s exhibit, Brief Encounters, alludes to how he usually photographs and to how his photography shifted when he began using digital equipment and processes. For a couple of decades, starting in the early ‘90s, he photographed with 4x5 view cameras (and sometimes a medium format camera) using black-and-white film, and made prints in his home darkroom. “It was a great way to make pictures,” Mark says, “but it involved a lot of labor and a lot of limits.”
