This year marks Viewpoint Gallery’s 25th anniversary. For this milestone year Viewpoint’s annual juried exhibit, TWELVE, invites submissions that express the relationship between photography and time. Time, of course, is in photography’s tools. Shutter speeds that split a second into amazingly small fractions and “B” – the 19th century carry over abbreviation that puts the photographer in control of the length of time the shutter is open. Time is also in the language used to express photography’s ideas like the much sought “decisive moment” and memories that are held suspended in time like visual fossils. Time for photography is the frozen collision of the instant and also the on-going ooze of long exposures of traffic or wind or the Milky Way. In fact, all photographs are time exposures of longer or shorter durations. Photography is the record of seasons, growth, decay, memories, the past always present yet always past, and dreams. And what of the time spent planning a photograph, then waiting, watching. Or the time after making the initial exposures spent editing, combining, reimagining. Chair time. Time is certainly ever present in photography. This year's TWELVE: It’s About Time.
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.
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.
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."
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.”
Today, mistaking plastic debris for food in the Pacific gyre is a common occurrence resulting in the death of countless albatross each year. Plastic is often designed for "single-use" (think straw, cup, bottle) but, by its nature, every molecule ever developed is still with us today. The paradox of beauty, created from artifacts recovered from the remains of dead albatross, generates a message that can more sustainably inform the viewer. We live in a disposable society — what we throw away, we ultimately consume. Before we seek to change what we dislike, we must consider the consciousness and intention that has created what we see.
Dennis Scott’s fascination with photography started when he was around 12 years old, with a Kodak Brownie camera, and grew from there. Photography combines both his artistic and mechanical talents, just as his profession, architecture, does. “To produce high-level photographs requires me to travel somewhere where I can leave the daily to-do list back home and concentrate on photography. For me, it can be as close as Harlow’s nightclub in Midtown Sacramento and as far away as South Africa. Presently, my commitment is mostly expressed in environmental portraiture, and journalistic photography related to nature and architecture."
Viewpoint is delighted to present an extraordinary retrospective exhibit celebrating fifty years of photography by John Wimberley.
The digital photographic revolution leaped forward with the introduction of Adobe Photoshop twenty-five years ago. Today Photoshop is the essential tool in digital darkrooms around the world. Almost every image in print, on the web or in galleries is edited in Photoshop or Photoshop Lightroom. The edits range from rudimentary cropping, spotting, sizing, increases in contrast and sharpening to sophisticated restoration and retouching, high dynamic range processing, and elaborate collages.
In the Main gallery in October, Viewpoint Photographic Art Center presents Ishi and the River of Time, photographs by Byron Wolfe. In an extraordinary set of large-scale composite photographs, Wolfe investigates the appearance of Ishi, the legendary Yahi Indian who emerged from the wilderness near Oroville, California August 28, 1911 — marking the final days of “stone age” California. Wolfe’s photographic composites explore this significant anthropological event in California’s cultural history. Drawing upon archival photographs and contemporary views of historical sites, Wolfe reconstructs the memory and traces of Ishi in time. Using the power of digital photography, Wolfe enlivens and finesses Northern California history and the Ishi story that has been slowly transformed from “America’s last wild Indian” to America’s most misunderstood Indian.
