Bill Franson | Dogtown

Bill Franson's Dogtown series started from an abiding interest in the physical residue of ideas impressed on the landscape. He was driven to explore what was left after the original intent for a space had diminished and it had succumbed to weather and nature’s relentless transformation and the eyes of later generations.

Dogtown has a rich history, the earliest as the original inland Gloucester settlement, later abandoned for the economic possibilities on the coast. During the Depression, the wealthy eccentric philanthropist Roger Babson created a Works Progress Administration project, hiring unemployed stone-masons to chisel his favorite words and inspirational phrases onto several dozen massive glacial moraine boulders, creating what he called his stone book.

Over time the stone littered open fields yielded to forest. The effect of walking through a densely wooded area and coming across a boulder with words like “Help Mother” or “Truth” can be quite startling, and though the phrases come across as openly honest and sentimental, found in the landscape they are strangely unsettling and intellectually provocative.

Jennifer Hudson | modus operandi

Jennifer Hudson, Borrowed Time from the series Medic

Through her series Medic, Jennifer Hudson created a narrative about human relationships during illness and recovery.  Each of the ten images in the series tells a slightly different story.  Although the room stays as the constant, everything around the room and within the room change.  Actually, look again.  Doors that were in one image disappear in the next.  That's right, the room is the only thing that is physically there.  Everything else that you see, all of the objects, knobs, doors, clocks, tubes, machines, etc etc were all created in Photoshop.  A visitor to the gallery said recently, "It's like Hudson has a big folder of endless clip art that she can pick and choose from to create her imagery."

Jennifer Hudson, Flora #1

These intricately built images help to define Hudson's modus operandi.  They began in earlier projects such as her series Flora.  The five woman depicted in her series Flora all were thought up during a visit and long walk through one of the most infamous prisons in the United States, Alcatraz.  As Hudson states, "Flora is an illustration of perception, perfectionism and confinement, coupled with an earnest celebration of the woman, her nature, and her continued strength."

Both of these series are on display currently in our exhibition Processes and Dreams through Feb. 28th.  To see more of these images, click on the link to visit our website: www.panopticongallery.com

Follow Friday | Peabody Essex Museum

Dear Boston Photo Community,

I'm writing to you today to let you know that there is a wonderful museum on the North Shore that some of you have yet to experience and I don't want you to miss out.

It's called the Peabody Essex Museum and it's my Follow Friday suggestion of the day. 
On Twitter they are:  @peabodyessex

Jerry Uelsmann, Untitled (Philistine's Eye), 1961

I recently went to the Peabody Essex Museum for a reception for one of my heroes in photography Jerry Uelsmann.  The exhibition called, The Mind's Eye: 50 Years of Photography by Jerry Uelsmann officially opens tomorrow.  During the reception, it was brought to our attention that P.E.M. has designated 2012 as their 'Year of Photography'.  It will kick off with the Uelsmann exhibition, then continue with an exhibition of work by local photographer Barbara Bosworth and be capped off with the exhibition Ansel Adams: At the Water's Edge, which they have stated as being a show like you have never seen before.

Their photography collection consists of nearly a million prints, more than any other museum in all of New England.  One of its prized possessions is a Daguerreotype of Pont Neuf in Paris made in 1839 (the year of photography's invention).

Curator of Photography Phillip Prodger, who has been there for the past three years has been leading the charge.  A few of the past exhibitions include the recent Man Ray | Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism, The Kennedy's: Portrait of a Family by Richard Avedon, Valerie Belin: Made Up, and Surfland: by Joni Sternbach.

The Uelsmann exhibition is fantastic!  They have many of his classic images on display, and vintage prints that have never been seen before.  Have you ever seen his pillows, or flip books, or his portrait on a rock? 

The Peabody Essex Museum is located in Salem, MA.

Tami Bone | Mythos

Let us think for a moment on how stories are told.  Some stories are read in books while others are passed down from generation to generation.  Some are of truths, secrets and that of folklore.

Tami Bone, Girl in the Moon, 2010

Tami Bone's photographic series Mythos, delves into her upbringing as a young girl in Texas.  She states that the photographs touch upon her "yearnings, hopes and dreams" and those stories "pulled from early memories and imaginings."

Tami Bone, Fish Story, 2010

You can see photographs from this series in the exhibition Processes and Dreams on display at Panopticon Gallery from January 12 - February 28, 2012.

From Near and Afar

From near and afar, photographer Neal Rantoul has shaped his career in photographing primarily in the landscape.  When I look at his work, I don't feel I'm looking through the eyes of a landscape photographer, but rather a thinker and note taker.

Through his lens, Rantoul is taking notes, visual documents of the cities and spaces he encounters on his every journey.  They are never just straightforward photographs, rather a grouping or 'series' of photographs are created to document the place.  Often times you need to see the full portfolio of images to figure out just how Rantoul wanted you to see what he saw.  Sequence also plays a great deal in his process.  You would never understand that by viewing just one photograph. 

The images in this portfolio, which he refers to as: Trees, An Italian Series, were shot in Italy in the fall of 2009 during a sabbatical from his teachings at Northeastern University.  This region in Italy was not new to Rantoul.  He often made pilgrimages to this area in the 1990's while teaching summer workshops in Venice.

Rantoul states, "On my way from Venice to Trieste, I drove through this flat agricultural area and became intrigued by these grouping of trees. Over the course of a few weeks I returned again and again to this area to photograph.  During some of my first trips to this region, I worked in color, but decided that by printing them using a black and white duotone process (the process of introducing a warmer color into the black & white tones) rendered their beauty best."

Curtis Wehrfritz | Daguerreotypes re-visited in the 21st century.

Curtis Wehrfritz (Toronto, Canada)
Secret Heart
1/2 plate daguerreotype

One of the best ways to meet new, emerging artists to exhibit in the gallery is by attending portfolio review events.  I met Curtis Wehrfritz, a Toronto, Canada based artist first at FotoFest Paris, then five months later at PhotoLucida in Portland, Oregon.  As he sat across the table from me, he began to unwrap these delicate mirrored images. These mirrored images are referred to as Daguerreotypes or 'dags'.  I was amazed to see that there was someone taking a vintage process like this and bringing it into the 21st Century.

Wehrfritz uses photography "as a story telling device", and in this series, Fluidrive, he focuses on the use of ritual.  He explained, "I am interested in a lyric image that can be revisited by the viewer in the way one revisits the feelings created in a song or prose."

The experience of interacting with and or observing a work of art is personal and relative to the viewer's taste --their likes and dislikes. But what if when you looked at the art, you could also see yourself reflected back.  This is precisely what happens when viewing a Daguerreotype. Your reflection can be seen in the silvery, mirrored surface all the while hovering below the surface, a ghostly photographic image presents itself.  I've always wondered if this dual gaze changes how a viewer thinks about or reacts to looking at Daguerreotypes.

"When Daguerre announced his great invention to the public in the summer of 1839, he explained how it worked but not really what it was for.  The process was obviously a miracle of the age of science, and like any miracle it was self-justifying.  Painters did say that it would be a great aid to art, and physicists said it would be a great aid to science, but the important thing, on which everyone agreed, was that it was astonishing.  Pictures of exquisite perfection had been formed directly by the forces of nature." --John Szarkowski, Looking At Photographs.

Daguerreotypes by Curtis Wehrfritz are on display in the exhibition Processes and Dreams at Panopticon Gallery from January 12 - February 28, 2012.

Emmanuelle Germain | Le Vent #2

Emmanuelle Germain (French)
Le Vent #2, 2009
32x47" archival pigment print

Emmanuelle Germain, Le Vent #2

I first met Emmanuelle Germain as an undergraduate at The Art Institute of Boston in 1992.  We reconnected through Facebook in 2010 and in November of 2011 we met up in Paris for the first time in eighteen years.

The title of her photograph, Le Vent #2, which simply translates to The Wind, captures a young woman, who by first glance looks as if she is levitating off the pavement.  When I spoke to her about the work, she said, "Wind suggests anger to me, that’s what it creates here after a few days...everybody’s aggressive!"

Germain's series Le Vent is a direct contrast to the video project that she had worked on prior where she captured a woman walking slowly through downtown Marseille, France, tracing the steps of her daily commute.  "I wanted to work with someone who had danced, someone interested in gravity, heaviness, the ground, basically, someone who was in control of her movements and not afraid of falling, or getting hurt. 

Aaron Siskind, No. 37 from the series
Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation, 1953

Freezing a moment in time is the essence of what photography is about.  That split second where the click of the shutter now represents the past.  Germain's photograph is reminiscent of many that have come before it.  Two well-known bodies of work that touch on levitation and gravity include Aaron Siskind's series Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation and a project Stephen DiRado did called Jump, a leap-of-faith off of a bridge on Martha's Vineyard.

Stephen DiRado, from the series Jump

Germain ads, "The wind is invisible, it moves everything upside down, it is wild, unpredictable and yet I asked this person to dance with it and use its strength. The results look quiet and peaceful compared to what it took to make these images."

Le Vent #2 can be seen in the exhibition Processes and Dreams at Panopticon Gallery in Boston, MA from January 12 - February 28, 2012.