Sunday, July 15, 2012
OUT OF THE SHADOWS
by MICHAEL J. FRESSOLA, Arts Editor
The most important factor in photography is time. Or maybe it’s light. Or neither. What are time and light if there’s no contrast?
The best short definition of photography? “Fixing a shadow.”
Time, light and shadow are all part of the “Best of the Staten Island Camera Club,” a small showcase this month in Wagner College’s Spotlight Gallery. The club, formerly called the Color Photographers Club of Staten Island, is 58 years old this year.
The show is a juried exhibition, vetted by judges associated with a local network of camera clubs. The 15 participants all achieved the judges blessing, namely high rankings.
Significantly or not, all the images in the show are color photographs, although one is very close to being color-free or grisaille (i.e. shades of gray). The range of possible subjects was edited, nudging participants toward art rather than, say, photojournalism. One member, Len Rachlin, shot exactly the kind of fruit-bowl still-life that a student painter might set up to paint.
People/portraits were ruled out. But animals were allowed. So often they exhibit personality (or we imagine that they’re being personable). In any case, Mary Fulks did not call her portrait of an outrageously red-haired orangutan “Pensive” for nothing. He/she looks thoughtful.
Craftily, Dennis Arculeo’s “Mardi Gras” is a sly way of photographing a face without an actual visage. The shimmering carnival mask he shot is so expressive, it looks regal, even disdainful.
Much as Georgia O’Keeffe highlighted the structural similarities of certain flowers and certain reproductive equipment, photographers expose similar parallels. But in her “Lily’s Stamen and Pistils, Carol Mayr used digital manipulation to transform the color and textures, so that the piece looks like an etching.
AUTO FOCUS
Digital sleight-of-hand figures in many submissions, so discreetly in some cases it’s impossible to see; so boldly in others, it’s almost the whole idea.
In Dennis Smith’s “Life in the Fast Lane,” an orange cab is literally whooshing along a no-color 42nd Street. By contrast Hilda Rubin probably didn’t do much to “Auto Grille and Headlight,” a suave chrome-and-yellow vintage car portrait.
Carolyn Flynn’s “Chinese Scholars Garden,” a detail of one of the ornate pavilions in the garden at Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden, has selected improvements. “I enhanced the sky and water,” she said last week by e-mail, “and added a little color to the flowers.”
She also took pains in the old-fashioned way to control other factors: She shot with her SLR Canon Rebel mounted on a tripod, an hour or two before sunset in late summer light last August.
Ms. Flynn, who teaches an introductory Adobe Photoshop course at the Joan & Alan Bernikow JCC, acknowledges its limits: “It’s nice to fool with the filters and other things, but to be truthful, if the image is not a good one, nothing you do can make it better.”
The show also has some straight-up hometown material. It’s good to see it because it’s so easy to take photogenic superabundance for granted. Still, shooting the Verrazzano is almost cheating, isn’t it?
How do you take a bad shot of it? But in his mist-cropped view of one tower, Mark Harris casts the bridge in a new guise, impersonating the Golden Gate wrapped in the chilly fingers of Pacific fog.
Speaking of deviousness (few truisms are so false as the statement, “the camera doesn’t lie”), Jen Bortner’s “Just Passing Time” (the title’s a pun) is a shot of someone taking a photograph of a passing container ship (“Italia”) gliding up the Kill van Kull.
Or maybe it isn’t. Perhaps it’s the photographer himself in a double-camera caper. Only his friends know for sure.
WHAT IS A PHOTOGRAPH?
This is the question of the summer for the youngest of the borough’s photo clubs, the Creative Photographers Guild, which runs its own small exhibition space at 814 Richmond Terrace (entrance on Tysen Street, next door to Snug Harbor) in Livingston.
“What is a Photograph” is a group show — up through Aug. 19 — featuring member Robert Haber.
Participants and viewers are being encouraged to think about landscape photographer Ansel Adams’s declaration: “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”
The Spotlight Gallery in Wagner College's Horrmann Library presents "The Best of the Staten Island Camera Club," an exhibition of work by 15 local photographers, on display through Aug. 17.
Photographers included in the show are Dennis Arculeo, Jen Burtner, Barbara Feist, Marge Fernandez, Carolyn Flynn, Mary Fulks, Diane Griffiths, Mark Harris, Jeanne Killackey, Carol Mayr, Eric Mayr, Len Rachlin, Hilda Rubin, Paul Rubin and Dennis Smith.
The Spotlight Gallery is open during normal library hours.