Richard Halliburton’s lifelong relationship with Yellowstone National Park began in the summer after his high school graduation. A midwesterner who had never been west of Kansas City, he drove with a companion to Yellowstone’s Old Faithful Inn for a summer job. “It was not love at first sight,” he relates. “The weather was cold and rainy. I knew no one; I had no friends. After a week, I was on the verge of quitting my job and going home.”
“Then the sun came out and my life changed forever.... I began to understand the idea of wilderness and why it matters. I discovered photography.”
In October, Viewpoint Photographic Art Center features retrospective collections by Robert Taylor and Charles Farmer, two contemporary masters in the West Coast tradition of beautifully-crafted black-and-white photographs.
Millee Tibbs is interested in surfaces and their relationship to what lies beneath – the discrepancy between what we see and what we know. “I am drawn to photography,” Tibbs states, “because of its ubiquitous presence in our culture and its duplicitous existence as both an indexical representation of reality and a subjective construction of it. It is a slippery medium that easily shifts from scientific documentation of a moment in time to a subjective construction of reality. I am interested in the space where these qualities contradict each other and coexist simultaneously. Mountains and Valleys uses images of the American West as a starting point to interpret and confront cultural myths surrounding our relationship to that landscape.”
“The human figure is exquisitely beautiful,” states Debra Small about her body of work, Nudes: A Romantic Encounter, “and it was my intention to have that beauty resonate from the images.” Stylistically, she strove to create “picturesque romantic imagery similar to the nudes of the pictorial period.” Two key techniques employed in the crafting of these images were light painting and salt printing. While making the exposures, Small used diffused flashlights “to paint light onto the model’s body, giving a lovely soft glowing light to the skin.” She then converted the digital camera images to black-and-white digital negatives and then made salt prints. Salt printing, which dates back to the early 1800s, is considered the first photographic printing process on paper.
Viewpoint Photographic Art Center is pleased to present Henry Paine’s photographic exhibit Vintage Lace Designs of the Early 20th Century in its Step Up Gallery in June.
This exhibit showcases new work by students currently enrolled in classes at the high school or college level. Submissions were open to the full range of photographic techniques (i.e., film, digital, alternative process, pinhole, mixed media, digital manipulation, montage, photogram, hand-colored, etc.).
In its main gallery for March, Viewpoint Photographic Art Center presents the art of Raven Victoria Erebus and Gail Parris in an exhibition titled Avian Studies. While all of prints in the exhibit begin with photographs of birds, both artists employ sophisticated image-processing and printing techniques to create pictures with an intent much different from the description that is the dominate feature of “straight” photography.
In September 2013, eminent Northern California photographer and educator Rick Murai led a Viewpoint-sponsored photography workshop in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Participants in the Sacred Festivals of Bhutan workshop enjoyed a fascinating twelve-day adventure documenting the stunning landscape, ancient architecture, and warm and gracious people of what many consider to be the Last Shangri-La. From photographing the daily activities in the cities and villages around Paro, Thumphu, and Bumthang, to mingling with the attendees at two colorful sacred festivals, the workshop provided a totally immersive experience with ample opportunity for discovery, image sharing, and introspection. This exhibit presents a selection of images created during the workshop.
Gary Wagner's exhibit, Sierra Mountain Wilderness is in the Step Up Gallery during February. “Wilderness, nature, and the world around me is the studio I use for my photographic work,” says Wagner. “I find freedom and inspiration to create my interpretations of the natural elements and scenic vistas that come to my view at these locations.”
In November, Viewpoint’s Main Gallery features three photographers – David Ashcraft, Jimmy Fike, and Magnus Stark – who have three very different approaches to making photographic art.
Study. Learn. Teach. Share. Take. Give. The ten photographers in Wider Circles studied at Sierra College and then expanded the circle outward, each making a life while making a living in photography. The exhibit includes work by Tim Engle, Chris Fraser, Jeff Gros, Drew Herrmann, Michael Kirby, Gene Rodman, Jon Sadler, Daryl Stinchfield, Tee Taylor, Kathy Walker and Rebecca Gregg. Today they are studio owners, assistants, freelancers, commercial photographers, photojournalists, artists and professors. The show is a small sample both of their work and of the professionals who are engaged in the dynamic lifelong process of being students of photography.
In Stu Levy’s Grid-Portraits, several negatives are contact-printed in a grid arrangement to create “a space and time scan,” function both as environmental portraiture and as explorations of how we perceive complex imagery. Referring to the phrase Henri Cartier-Bresson famously used to characterize his photographic ideal, Levy states, “this work gives a new meaning to ‘The Decisive Moment’, for the lattice-window view presents a maze of scrambled time and recombinant architecture.”
In the Step Up Gallery in October, Viewpoint Photographic Art Center presents the photography of Garrett Cotham in an exhibit titled On Trail: Images from Hiking Trails of the American West.
Gary Cawood began his ongoing body of photographs, Excavation, in 2006. “Since the natural landscape is considered expendable in our culture, the surface scars we create seemed like an intriguing subject to explore,” he explains. “I selected sites that were excavated long ago, and at first I focused on the surprising forms and colors created by erosion. Soon I began adding throwaways to the compositions. Like the land, much of the stuff we buy is considered disposable and makes its way to sites like these. I utilized the scarred landscape as a context for the stuff we abandon.”
