August 08, 2020 through September 08, 2020
The Portfolios 2020
Congratulations to the photographers showing work in The Portfolios 2020
Laurie Freitag • Karen Hymer • Rich Bergeman
Pat Rose • Brian Edwards • Jan Becket
Walt O’Brien • Matthew Ragen • Ryan Synovec
Please join us for opening day on Saturday, August 8th from 11 – 4pm
LightBox Photographic Gallery opens the walls to select work from these selected emerging and established Photographic Artists.
We are very happy to present the work of these 9 photographers showing a diverse collection of beautiful work.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
Rich Bergeman – Corvallis, Oregon
Coronavirus Skies
During the pandemic lockdown, my daily walks have provided both relief and inspiration. Rather than watch the sidewalk in front of my feet, I’ve been gazing skyward, and find that lifting my eyes to the skies has buoyed my spirits more than I could have imagined. So I began taking my infrared camera along to capture some of the remarkable, even joyous, cloud formations I see along the way. Because infrared renders the cold blue atmosphere as a deep dark value, it consequently reveals even the wispiest cirrus patterns in stark contrast. And perhaps because of reduced air pollution during the coronavirus shutdown, the cirrus arrays seem more pronounced than ever as they dance across the sky, providing an emotional release from earthly tribulations.
Karen Hymer – Silver City, New Mexico
Solitude Series
Solitude is a series about place, specifically, the Oregon coast. My creative process begins directly on the land: walking in isolation, looking closely and feeling deeply. As an artist, spending time in the landscape transports me away from the modern world of bright colors, loud noises, and constant sensory bombardment. While photographing in nature, I slow down and reconnect with the earth, seeing the world more clearly. I am drawn in by the deep shadows of the forest, the moist and fragrant earth, and the lush foliage.
The images begin as iPhone photographs. I then turn them into small, intimate, photopolymer gravure etchings. The ink palette is warm conjuring up memory and dreams, referencing times past. I hope to reach the viewer on a primal level of feeling rather than thinking. Through mystery, ambiguity, and beauty I hope to encourage greater awareness in the viewer of the need for conservation and preservation.
Matthew Ragen – Seattle, Washington
The Cuba Portraits
Every country has a soul. Every city has a spirit. Every street has a character or two or maybe more. In my travels through Cuba during December of 2019, I became increasingly intrigued by the weathered and expressive faces of Cubans that I observed on the sidewalks and streets. It is sometimes said that wrinkles are the medals for the passage of life as they are the indicators of where smiles have been. If this is true, then these people have truly lived. These people are indeed the characters on the streets of Cuba. As I experienced the hospitality and welcoming nature of these Cubans, I started to make photographs of the proud people of this isolated island country. I envisioned these as black and white portraits printed with the platinum process to eke out every detail.
This was my first visit ever visit to Cuba and, at least to now, eight months later, it was the last airplane flight that I made before the Covid-19 crisis shut everything down. I wonder what has become of these people and I hope that they are successfully weathering the storm. In this difficult time, we are all earning our wrinkles. In a different era, with the passage of time, I hope to visit again and create new memories of this fascinating country.
Walt O’Brien – Creswell, Oregon
Walt has been photographing since about 1957. He has been a member of PhotoZone Gallery since 1992 and has exhibited there and in other galleries to include Umpqua Valley Arts Association, Umpqua Community College Gallery, Jacobs Gallery, Oregon Arts Alliance, Emerald Art Center, LightBox Gallery, Maude Kerns Art Center, the Center For Photographic Art in Carmel California, Bostick and Sullivan Gallery in Santa Fe and The University of Oregon Law Center. He taught photography at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg and Lane Community College. Walt also has a large body of Color, B&W and alternative process work. Walt has been involved in a project to create photo books.
4 images from the series “Sienna Woods”
The series consisted of photographs made over a period of many years. The work started in winter at the Mt. Pisgah Arboretum outside Eugene and was first titled “Winter Brush”. Over the years it evolved to include images from all over the state and a few in other states. Most of the images were made in western Oregon. The image Umpqa Light was made in 1977 on 35mm film. The other three were shot with medium and large format film cameras from the 1980’s to present.
The images show the patterns and forms of woods and underbrush. They reflect moods of the seasons tempered by the photographer’s moods. These 4 images are sepia toned silver gelatin prints that were recently printed from original negatives dating back as far as 1977.
https://www.blurb.com/b/1501872-sienna-woods..
Pat Rose – Portland, Oregon
Pat Rose is a photographer based in Portland, Oregon. She is a retired teacher of English as a Second Language who has taught in Saudi Arabia and Turkey, as well as in Austin, Texas, and most recently at Portland State University. After picking up her first digital camera a few years before her retirement, she quickly developed many photographic interests. Her work now includes landscape, street and portrait photography, as well as botanical scanography. Landscape and street photography appeal to her love of wandering and exploring new places, while her interest in portraiture stems from a desire to work collaboratively with her subjects. Currently, she is exploring an alternative form of photography as a means of artistic expression by using a flatbed scanner rather than a conventional camera to make digital images of her botanical subjects. Her scanner photography work has been an excellent way to continue her creative efforts as she practices self isolation during the current pandemic. Her botanical scans are meant to be a celebration of the beauty and grace still to be found in the world during these troubled times. Indeed, her artistic sensibilities gravitate in general to the beautiful and the sublime, which she attempts to emulate as she continues to develop a personal photographic style that presents an aura of understated elegance. She has shown her work in various juried group exhibitions in several galleries in Oregon, and in Texas, and her landscape photos have been published in two outdoor guidebooks. Recently, she has also begun writing about photography for Oregon ArtsWatch, an online magazine about culture and the arts in the Pacific Northwest. Much of her photography can be found on her website at www.patrosephotography.com.
Laurie Freitag – Los Angeles, California
‘In the Garden at Chislehurst’
My series, ‘In the Garden at Chislehurst’, explores the challenges of adjusting emotionally to the Covid-19 pandemic as a woman who has had basically an easy life full of good health, work with purpose and security.
When the pandemic came to my world I thought I could ‘handle’ it. I thought ‘I had it all under control’ but I spent most evenings stockpiling supplies from Amazon preparing for the worst that was yet to come. My living room is full of boxes of oatmeal, quinoa and pasta, tins of olive oil, and masks and gloves to last, well, awhile!
My days, on the other hand, are spent in a garden as a nanny to a 4 year-old boy, where he pulls berries from a bush to make berry stew and I sit alongside him in the dirt as he ‘cooks.’ In this world of calm I feel like a child myself, ignorant to the perils of the pandemic.
Using my cell phone, I photograph the world I spend my days in. By exploring the world of nature I have found balance and emotional discovery. I hope that in sharing my journey, others can start their own self-discovery in a fragile world.
Brian Edwards – Santa Fe, New Mexico
This series examines the decline of rural communities that has occurred in many parts of the United States. Many economists, sociologists, political scientists have long suggested the existence of a second America, and a recent book by MIT economist Peter Temin (The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy) argues that the middle class is vanishing and America is becoming more of a developing country instead of a developed country.
Using images taken in New Mexico and Colorado, this series of images suggest narratives of change, decline, and abandonment. Looking at this phenomenon at a higher level, somewhat akin to a windshield survey, these images are depictive and observational, and do not attempt to answer why this transformation of the American middle class into two groups has taken place.
Instead, these images document place and provide a glimpse into the surface of an emerging second world where workers earn lower wages, are saddled with debt, and if they are employed, work in industries that offer little of the job security afforded workers in the financial and high technology sectors that account for an increasing share of the benefits of economic growth in an increasingly globalized and technology-driven world.
Jan Becket – Honolulu, Hawaii / Scappoose, Oregon
I spent most of my life on Oʻahu, where I was born, but it was years after I started documenting cultural sites
that I stopped and asked myself why I was doing that. Iʻm not Hawaiian. The short answer is that the camera
always faces in two directions. In photographing Hawaiian cultural sites, I also document the effects of Western
presence on a non-Western landscape and on the culture that once fully occupied it.
To photograph a place is a way to acquire familiarity with it, and perhaps to see it as it was seen by its original
inhabitants. In addition to structures of stone, many original place names remain in Hawaiʻi, a vast treasure still
somewhat intact. Islands were named, and within each island, districts (moku) and below those, ahupuaʻa, and
below those ʻili, and so on, down through many layers to small plots of land and single stones. In photographing
places in Hawaiʻi, one sooner or later becomes interested in their names, which then occasionally turn into small
openings in the fabric of time, through which one might catch a glimpse of the original cultural landscapes that
thrived there.
For several years I had the privilege of teaching sections from several works of Hawaiian orature, long epics
memorized and passed down from one generation to the next in a form called kaʻao that included narrative,
chant, and dance. These are extended performance pieces, like western opera, but much longer. Hawaiian orature
communicates through a complex and multi-layered language of place reference. It is so intimately tied to
particular landscapes that it is now impossible, even with a superficial understanding of those epics, to pass
through those landscapes without thinking of the events connected to them. In Hiʻiakaikapoliopele, Hi‘iaka and
Wahineōma‘o land on O‘ahu at Wāwāmalu near Makapuʻu, where the inhabitants are embarrassed for their lack
of food to offer their guests. Hi‘iaka falls in love with the handsome chief Kanahau at Olomana, and outwits the
moʻo goddess Hauwahine nearby at Kawainui in Kailua. Later, she slays another moʻo named Mokoli‘i at
Kualoa and much later the monster Pōhakuloa at Mākua, where she brings a young woman back to life and
tosses his lifeless body over the mountain to become a stone I have photographed at Mokulēʻia. Every mile of
the island yields a chapter from her journey, or from another kaʻao. Add to this layer the vast body of orature in
hula and chant. The landscapes in Hawaiʻi are permeated by mo‘olelo (stories) and mele (chant) to such a degree
that the two are inseparable. Landscape is mo‘olelo.
Kiʻi Pōhaku, Waiʻanae (Petroglyph in Waiʻanae District, Oʻahu) — This is a largely pristine, unknown site.
The rainbow over the head is a sign of an aliʻi (chief) but we do not know which one. Several honu (turtle)
petroglyphs are also on that ledge, a place where honu feed on limu (seaweed).
Hale Kahiko, Kaūpūlehu (Old House, Kaūpūlehu District, Hawaiʻi Island) — A structure near the beach in a
place known for salt-gathering hollows in the lava along the shore. We know that the structure is a residence
(and not a heiau) because of the amount of midden (refuse from long-ago meals).
Heiau, Kohala ʻAkau (Religious Temple, North Kohala) — An archaeological survey recently recorded 26
heiau in an upland area now used as a cattle ranch. They occur in places that also have the slight furrows of the
Kohala field system, a vast agricultural complex. They were probably used by the makaʻāinana (commoners).
Kulaʻilaʻi Moʻo, Waiʻanae (The Lizard Goddess Kulaʻilaʻi, Waiʻanae District, Oʻahu) — The moʻo lived in the
small stream muliwai (estuary) nearby and occasionally swam out to sea. The stone is her body form.
Unfortunately, her stone became westernized as “Pray for Sets” (of waves), and then “Pray for Sex.” Nearby is
the place where Hiʻiaka killed the monster Pōhakuloa and brought the maiden Koʻiahi back to life.
www.janbecket.net
Ryan A. Synovec
ASPECT R.A.S
faraway in time
faraway in mind
Like my projects “Ethereal” and ‘Chicago – in contrast”, Faraway was shot on infrared film using a Holga camera.
Many of the images were shot using 6 to 12 minute exposures, transforming a dynamic ocean and sky.
smoothing
evening
Creating an image calm and timeless, faraway from here and now.
As with all of my projects, none of the images have been digitally manipulated.
These are limited edition prints on Hahnemuehle Museum Etching paper using Piezography carbon pigment inks.
“Faraway” was recently featured in “Shadow and Light” magazine and received the Excellence Award from Black & White magazine in 2017. You can view the entire portfolio by going to my website:www.aspectrasphotography.com