Viewpoint Exhibit History

Judy Yemma works with historical photographic processes, such as Platinum/Palladium, Cyanotype and VanDyke, using hand-applied techniques that connect her to her roots as a painter. Her final prints become unique with some being truly one of a kind. She is particularly attracted to curved lines and shapes, to the restful and serene, to the emotion of an image, and to the potential of putting her own twist on an image.

America, from the Edge features four unique perspectives on American life and landscape by photographers David Best, Mike Dikau, Sandrine Hermand-Grisel and Toni Voelker. Their works run the gamut from noir to bizarre and from Barbie dolls to the Midas Mufflerman.

Viewpoint’s annual Members’ Exhibit will be on display from June 12 through July 3, 2009. The exhibit gives all Viewpoint members an opportunity to showcase one image of their choosing. The images in this show highlight the diversity of photographic art created by Viewpoint members, from traditional color and black-and-white images to prints made using alternative processes, digital manipulation, and other methods. All images are copyrighted by the artists.

Viewpoint Gallery presents the works of well known photographer Ryuijie in an exhibition titled “Memories in Water,” during the month of August. The show contains photographs from two major bodies of work: Ice Forms, botanicals frozen in blocks of ice, and Kanchi, in which Ryuijie and his assistant, Camille Lenore, free-dive for images underwater, off the coast of Central California.

Arthur Drooker presents a powerful visual meditation on the cultures, conflicts and conquests that forged the New World. Covering significant ruins in Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America and South America, this exhibit offers a unique pictorial survey of the geographical, architectural and historical diversity that defines the Americas.

Lost Worlds highlights ruins that are acknowledged world wonders, little known gems and outright surprises. They include monumental temples of Mexico’s Mayan civilization, a former king’s palace on the island of Haiti, colonial churches ravaged by earthquakes in Guatemala and iconic Inca citadels in Peru’s Sacred Valley, some of the 33 sites that Drooker visited in sixteen countries. His luminous images, shot with a specially adapted digital infrared camera, expose crumbled walls, weathered facades and overgrown flora in ways most viewers have never seen.

Photographer Lewis Kemper has photographed the natural beauty of North America and its parklands for more than three decades. In travels around the world, he hones an ongoing love affair with light, harkening back to the words of the famed naturalist, John Muir, who, over a hundred years ago, said “Light, I know not a singular word fine enough for Light… holy, beamless, bodiless, inaudible floods of Light.” Kemper believes those words have summed up his life as a photographer. “Light is still important to me whether I am photographing nature or working on one of my “Photo Etchings,” a style I developed with digital techniques.”

Referring to the photographs in the show, Kemper says: “Notice the importance of the light in these images ... the light defines the image!”

The Edifice Europa exhibit includes images by three photographers who each portray European architecture in a distinctive manner. Linda Fitch is a traditional black and white photographer who photographs primarily at night, exploring the dark spaces we rarely stop to observe and seeking out remote places where time stands still. Jodie Hooker depicts French cathedrals in painterly "hand made" gum prints using artist’s papers and watercolor pigments. Steve Nieslony photographs castles, churches and courtyards "off the beaten path" to convey the lesser known beauty of village Europe.

A city street, a construction site, pristine nature—all fall into view in the work of photographer Mark Citret. Citret has explored deeply the question of exactly what constitutes a "landscape." He suggests that "a landscape is to human experience what a stage set is to a play." In Citret’s eyes and in his photographs, construction sites, cafes, motels, trees, industrial sites, parks, and more, all present themselves as "landscapes" equally fascinating and beautiful.

From October 5 to November 5, Viewpoint’s Step Up Gallery will feature photography by many of the docents and volunteers who are essential to the ongoing success of the the Viewpoint Photographic Art Center. The center is almost completely operated by volunteers, who labor all year to manage, plan, curate, install and watch over 22 exhibitions of photographic art by artists both local and internationally known.

Like a mini Members’ Exhibit, this show promises to surprise and excite with its diversity and quality. Its goal is to reward the volunteers for their efforts and also to honor them for their dedication to Viewpoint.

Viewpoint Photographic Art Center is pleased to present the exhibit Cuba: Opening Doors by Jan Lightfoot in its Step Up Gallery in September. The genesis of this exhibit began with a recent opportunity to travel and photograph in Cuba. Lightfoot found that, for an outsider, “Cuba transports one back in time, to a place that can only be imagined.”

“Cuba remains shrouded in mystery for most Americans,” says Lightfoot. “Life in Cuba is hard; most people wake up everyday wondering if they will have anything to eat that day. In the faces of many, hope is gone, and in others you see nothing else but hope. Time itself, for the people of Cuba, became one of the enduring issues to strike me, and I have tried to convey that.”

Viewpoint member Jim Klein of Lincoln will present work at the Step Up Gallery at Viewpoint in March, 2012. The photographs are the result of travel to Utah, a place universally known for its ancient and dramatic landscapes and also its much newer remains of man’s presence.

Klein cites John Szarkowski, famed photographer, critic and historian, who, in his book The Photographer’s Eye, “included Time as one of the defining aspects of photography as an art medium. But his consideration of time had more to do with how much of time was captured by the camera’s shutter than how time is conveyed by the image.”

The two sets of images in this exhibit, a deserted motel on Highway 70 near Moab and abstracts of rocks from Utah’s National Parks, depict the effects of time, and, in another perspective, timelessness.