Past Exhibits

The Surrealists believed the creativity that comes from deep within a person’s subconscious is more powerful and more authentic than any product of conscious thought.  They sought a revolution against the constraints of the rational mind.

Lorraine Castillo relies on her intuition when she makes a photograph.  She feels “this ultimately results in images that are a mirrored reflection of my emotions. My subconscious is my compass, seeing for me.” Her series, No Butterflies was created while she was caring for a loved one battling alcoholism. She describes the series as follows: ”Darkness is the uncertain place we all go before light seeps in, and before butterflies can fly.”

The annual Viewpoint Members’ Exhibit, a long-time tradition at Viewpoint, is always exciting for the quality and range of photographic art it showcases. Because it gives all Viewpoint members an opportunity to showcase one image of their choosing, the exhibit highlights the diversity of techniques, approaches, and personal visions in our photographic community.

Over the years, the Members’ Exhibit has reflected the general shift from traditional to digital techniques, but Viewpoint members continue to explore methods such as traditional black-and-white darkroom printing, alternative processes such as platinum/palladium and van dyke printing, hand coloring, digital compositing, and hybrid traditional/digital processes as methods for their creative expression through photography. The overall quality of the work makes the Members’ Exhibit an inspiration for photographers and a testament to the vitality of Viewpoint Photographic Art Center.

Jane Olin’s childhood years were spent in Steilacoom, a tranquil village overlooking Puget Sound in Washington State. Her introduction to photography came in high school where she fell in love with the darkroom experience. To her regret, she did not pursue an arts education and it was many years before she rediscovered her passion for photography. During the interval, she traveled widely for business. Japan, of all countries she visited, had the most profound impact, and its aesthetics and its Zen Buddhism resonated deeply with her.

The cultural emphasis on beauty found in nature, and in simplicity, in the imperfect, the transient, and the values of grace and subtlety suited her own. She maintains a mindfulness practice today, and present moment awareness is imbedded in her photographic process.

Like the Surrealists before her, Olin has a deep respect for the fortunes of chance.  So when a strong impulse to photograph an ordinary scene of dried plants falling against a wall came over her, she followed her intuition. The resulting images became the genesis of her new series On the Edge of Chance.

From the time she was a child, Susan Turner has enjoyed being with people different from her. It thus strikes her as perfectly natural that she spent most of the period from 1982 to 2009 living and photographing in Papua New Guinea, a large, distant country with more than 800 languages. Her personal endeavor during this time was to record, in the most honest and beautiful way she could, the daily and ritual life of this beautiful, diverse, and fascinating place.

Ms. Turner was inspired by participating in the lives the local people—tending gardens, fishing, caring for children, helping to settle disputes, and contributing to bridewealth payments and mortuary feasts. She lived in villages for long periods, returning to some year after year, and was adopted into several cultural groups. This close relationship to the people was always satisfying to her, as well as the only way to photograph as a member of the group, rather than as a casual observer.

Susan says of her experience, “Whatever depth and significance my pictures may have is largely due to the patience and generosity of friends and adopted relatives, who graciously accepted me into their lives.”

Albert Camus said that writers are obligated to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. Susan believes this is true for all artists, and in particular for the photographers who work among people with few, if any, means of expressing themselves to the outside world.

Please join us for a special Artists Reception and Fundraiser on Friday, April 7, 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

Guests will enjoy an array of Italian appetizers, luscious desserts, wine and beverages and live music. 

Tickets ($20) may be purchased online at the Viewpoint Store, or at the door.

There will also be a drawing ($5 per ticket, 5 for $25, 30 for $100). Prizes include: Bella Italia donated prints by Donald Satterlee and Michael Dunlavey and two gift certificates for 3 half-day Viewpoint Workshops of your choice.

In April, Viewpoint presents a stunning exhibit of images by Donald Satterlee and Michael Dunlavey entitled: Italia Bella.

Michael Dunlavey has been enthralled with Italy for a long time. He is drawn to the rich patina, textures, and reflections found at every turn in the backstreets and canals of Venice. Whether shooting intimate details or capturing the power and magnificence of ancient buildings, the contours of century old vinyards, or the landscapes of Tuscany, Chianti, and Umbria, he has created lasting images that convey the haunting beauty of the country. “Searching for something new to shoot on early morning walks energizes all my senses and makes me feel alive.”

Donald Satterlee’s images were taken in Venice, Tuscany, and many small villages around Northern Italy. In 2008 Satterlee started a personal project entitled Fogscapes. “Shooting photos on a drizzly foggy morning is a very peaceful and ethereal experience. It is my hope that viewing the images conveys that peace and calm.” After researching when Italy was most likely to have fog, Donald made two trips there in January in 2013 and 2014. “There were very few tourists, and securing a room was easy and better yet, several mornings were very foggy.” In an effort to create an “old postcard” feel, many photos have been converted to black and white, split toned, then textures and faint borders composited over the images.

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.

Isotalo’s photography is about capturing the balance and difference between moments that she perceives as tranquil and mysterious, versus those she finds more melancholy or uncertain. “I’ve always been aware of how these two very different ways of perceiving and responding can trigger emotions on a multi dimensional level,” she says. “I’m also interested in negative space in the sense of what is invisible or unknown and how that can create imaginary or altered realities. I combine old family photos, as well as other photos that I may find at thrift stores, with new images, placing myself in most of them. I use old images not as a way of staying stuck in the past, but rather as a way of honoring, understanding and preserving it. In many ways, I feel that I’m breathing new life into old photographs, keeping the past alive.”

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.

Jan Manzi first became interested in photography in college when she was able to learn the basics of working in a traditional darkroom and photographing a wide range of subjects. She began large format work after attending her first photography workshop, the Owens Valley Photography Workshop with Ray MacSavaney, John Sexton and Bruce Barnbaum as instructors. Inspired by the work of the instructors and Brett Weston, who welcomed participants to his home, Jan began to see things differently. Using a view camera helped her slow down and to pay more attention to how light can change textures and shapes. Most of Manzi’s work is with a 4x5 view camera and some with a 6x7 medium format camera.

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.”

Originally, Coggins used photography to document places he wanted to describe in his books. Then he hit upon the idea of including the photos he was taking in the books. Later, he began to alter the plot of his books to have an excuse to include photos he liked that didn’t have a reference to an existing scene. Now he “moves fluidly between writing and photography, doing both pretty much at the same time.”

Look at his image Zoltar Gets a Shove.  Why is the woman in the photograph pushing the fortune-telling machine through the street?  What brought her to that instant in her life? If Zoltar were to talk, what would he say? These are questions that the viewer asks and then finds herself creating a story to explain.  Coggins’s images portray more than just an instant in time. Somehow, with his writer’s sensibility, he is able to capture a moment that evokes a bigger story—a story redolent with humor and compassion.

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.

Presented as a constellation of narrative fragments, each photograph manifests the shared psychology between a transient character and constructed environments suggestive of Middle America. The character, wandering with alternating senses of desire and reticent detachment amid his surroundings, is an extension of a place no longer able to sustain itself.

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.

This photographic project seeks to remind all of us that what makes a warrior is inner spirit and strength, not outward gender. Rocky Bull’s subjects are not new heroes, but instead individuals from history who deserve to be recognized alongside and with the same reverence as their male counterparts.  “The photographs of the women that I have chosen are not meant to be imitation portraits of the real persons involved as the actual figures are long deceased. Rather, my work is intended to invoke the collective as well as the unique aspects of the warrior spirit of each of the women shown.”

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."