The Griffin Museum at Cambridge Homes

They are community volunteers and couples at home, in other words “everyday folks.” And photographer Jan van Steenwijk captures their lives.

Ordinary People, an exhibit culled from two bodies of his work produced in Bedford, MA, from 2000 to 2004 is featured at The Griffin Museum at the Cambridge Homes, 360 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA, September 6 through November 6. An opening reception is September 13, 6:30-7:30 p.m.

Van Steenwijk, who was born in the Netherlands, has created portraits of many famous people from the Queen of Denmark to photographer Ansel Adams. But, he’s also photographed regular people such as unemployed factory workers in Flint, Michigan.

One of Steenwijk’s series on exhibit at Cambridge Homes is a tribute to volunteers who, he says, “offer a tremendous amount of time to their communities without every seeking recognition.”

He adds, “their singular efforts help weave the fabric of our society, forming a sturdy foundation. Common to all of them is dedication, commitment, and generosity of spirit.” Each photograph is accompanied by text telling the person’s individual story.

The second series documents 25 couples at home. These portraits are also presented with handwritten life histories which, Steenwijk says, offer ” a tremendous source of information for future viewers about what we thought and the way we lived at the turn of the 21st century. Handwriting, seemingly a dying art going the way of the dinosaur, should similarly be captured for posterity.”

All the original material has been donated to the Bedford Historical Society.

Van Steenwijk’s photographs have been exhibited in Asia, Europe, and the United States and have been published in numerous books and magazines. He is the author of three books, USAROUND and Always on the Road, chronicling his first trip to America in 1982, and a children’s book, Purple Turtle – The Mysterious Fellow. He also has designed and edited many publications. Van Steenwijk moved to Bedford in 1989 and immediately became involved in community activities. He currently is president of the Bedford Historical Society.

The public is welcome to view the exhibit Monday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Please check in with the receptionist.

Robert Loren Lerch describes his photography as “documentary in nature and about deep-seated New England values: self-reliance, dignity, stoicism, a sense of propriety.”

While his work is about rural New England and its people, the images exclude people. Rather they show the places people inhabit and the objects of their everyday lives. “The human presence is felt, but not explicit,” Lerch says.

A series of his photographs, Sensuality with Sinew: Studying Character in New England, is at the Cambridge Homes, 360 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA, July 6 through September 4. An opening reception with the artist is July 12, 7:30-8:30 p.m.

“I am interested in the relationship between people and the places they choose to inhabit, how the places are changed as a result of this and how people themselves become changed,” he says.

He is drawn to northern and remote settings, “where the drama of seasonal cycles is most evident.” He says, “In all places, but somehow poignantly so in these places, life poses challenges, and this seems to mold certain types of characters.”

And, Lerch says, “It is a recurrent theme in my work that ordinary objects of everyday life, signs of wear attesting to their usefulness, seem themselves to be imparted with the character of their owners.The things tell the stories. Images of the natural world are properly included, for even those things we have chosen to leave unchanged have something to say about who we are.”

He is scrupulous about photographing things as he finds them, untouched by him.

As a young boy, Lerch spent many hours in a darkroom with his dad, who developed film with homemade equipment, and he still prefers using film and making prints with the greatest care.

With a degree in aerospace engineering, Lerch worked in the industry at the height of the space race. But, he says, after several years, “the photographer within needed to get free.” He left corporate life and established the R. Lerch Gallery in Rockport, MA, where he has lived for 30 years.

The public is welcome to view the exhibit Monday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Please check in with the receptionist.

British photographer Heather McDonough, who lived across the street from Doris, got to know the elderly woman briefly when she went into her home to take her portrait.

After Doris died and the house was sold, McDonough went back to the house to take a series of photographs for a book project. “I wanted to show some of Doris’ personality and keep that essence of a person,” McDonough says. ” Doris is one life in one house in Britain. This study is not an in-depth history, but a glimpse of a private and very English life.”

“I made Doris as I am interested in things disappearing, change, and human remnants,” McDonough says. “We seem to make, or at least hope to make, an indentation or impression while we are alive, but once we are dead, unless this existence is documented or our objects preserved there is nothing left after our physical presence is gone. This is about how quickly we are lost.”

The book includes 22 full-page color close-up photographs of the wallpapers and textiles found in the house, as well as 14 family photographs from Doris’ archives and text by neighbors who knew Doris.

“It’s about what you see, wallpapers, dirt, traces, objects, time and space, flowers, flowers in everything -the curtains, the net curtains, her dresses,” McDonough says.

It’s also universal. “The house is a place where we dream, it is a place where we are sheltered and protected,” she adds. “Often when someone is describing their childhood memories or we are looking at someone else’s family photographs, we cannot help but bring our own memories to the fore, and immediately start recalling our own stories.”

McDonough is a freelance photographer, artist, filmmaker, curator, and lecturer based in London, England. For the past 10 years, she’s been creating portraits as part of her personal work, commissions, and exhibits, and is currently accepting commissions for books and magazines.

As a founding member of the Jazz Club of Sarasota, Jean Germain had the unique opportunity to become the club’s official photographer. From 1981 through 2007, she photographed hundreds of musical legends from the big band era.

A series of her photographs, Jazz From Row Six, is featured in the Griffin Museum’s Gallery at the Cambridge Homes, 360 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, April 25 through July 6. An opening reception is May 24, 7:30-8:30 p.m.

This body of work, also published as a book, portrays many of the musicians who were in their 80s and 90s “playing out” the remainder of their lives with passion and joy. Germain was also able to capture some tender moments when the legends were playing with and mentoring the “kids,” Like John Pizzarelli (age 20 in the photo) Diana Krall. Howard Alden, and Byron Stripling.

Confined to her seat in row six, and not allowed to use flash or a tripod, Germain pushed technical and creative limits. When there was no stage lighting, she pushed the 3200 ASA film. And, when she couldn’t hold the camera steady, she used Cokin filters to produce the illusion of movement.

While working as a special education teacher, Germain used photography as a way to give her students another form of communication and expression, but she never imagined it as her voice. It was after she retired from teaching and became the jazz club’s photographer that her second career was born.

Her images have won numerous awards, been published in magazines and newspapers, and are held in private and public collections. They also have been published in the book, Jazz From Row Six.

The public is welcome to view the exhibit Monday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Please check in with the receptionist.

By photographing breathtaking ports of call, such as Grenada, Newport, Palma de Mallorca, Porto Cervo, and St. Barth´s, Cory Silken invites viewers “to experience a taste of the high life, including exceptional locations and multi-million dollar super-yachts.”

“Color of Wind,” a series of his yachting photographs, is on display at the Griffin Museum at The Cambridge Homes in Cambridge, MA, August 2 through October 3. An opening reception is August 3, 7:30-8:30 PM.

Silken is known for his sepia-toned panoramas, but these photographs are saturated with brilliant colors. The images are stretched five feet wide on “gallerie wrap” canvas and Silken’s remarkable timing captures the interaction between yachts and the dynamic play of sailing.

Whether he´s invited aboard the newest super-yacht or flying in a helicopter for the afternoon, Silken uses his privileged access to the private vessels to find unique vantage points and deliver an arresting perspective of the sport.

“The scope of this collection of works takes the viewer out of daily life and into the beauty of motion, color, and competition that lives on the water,” Silken says.

An avid outdoorsman, Silken´s main photographic and outdoor interest is yachting. He has crewed aboard the America’s Cup fleet in Newport, Rhode Island, and enjoys racing Firefly, a wooden Herreshoff S Class boat, in Narragansett Bay. Silken travels the world photographing boats, yachts, and ships for assignments and fine art work. His work regularly appears in local and international yachting and luxury lifestyle magazines, and has been published in several books. He also collaborates with filmmakers to provide full motion and still media solutions.

Silken has a gallery, Mariner Fine Art, in Newport, Rhode Island, and his work can be seen at www.corysilken.com.

 

Miriam Goodman considered herself a writer who took pictures. In fact, she had a talent for merging the two in a way that asks viewers to see her photographs in a specific, more personal way.

A collection of her work, After a Certain Age, is on display at The Griffin Museum at The Cambridge Homes in Cambridge, MA, May 17 through June 29. The exhibit runs in conjunction with the second anniversary of Goodman’s death on May 11, 2008, at age 69.

In After a Certain Age, Goodman’s photographs tell the story of a woman getting older. Using objects the woman handles and the spaces she moves through, Goodman adds words that remove any ambiguity and make the photographs very concrete in meaning. A collection of make-up and hair accessories is made more poignant by the words, “It was very important we told her how good she looked,” while a calendar with scribbled notes is given more meaning by the phrase, “She had trouble remembering dates.”

“In this body of work, Miriam Goodman is confronting us with what it is like to be aging and female,” explained Paula Tognarelli, executive director of the Griffin Museum. “Her work is very poignant. She is able to bring a serious, as well as a lighthearted approach to the topic of aging. On one hand, she’s grappling with the frustrating and challenging aspects of aging, while on the other hand she is able to laugh at herself.”

A poet for many years, Goodman, formerly of Arlington, MA, decided at age 50 to become a photographer. She went on to teach classes that merged the visual and writing disciplines.

She studied in the Photography Atelier program of the Radcliffe and Lesley Seminars and at the New England School of Photography (NESOP). She was the photography editor of the Women’s Review of Books and founder/co-coordinator of the Word & Image Lecture series sponsored by Lesley Seminars and The Center for Photographic Exhibition of the New England School of Photography. Her photographs have appeared on book jackets, in literary magazines, CD packaging, and on the web.

An opening reception After a Certain Age is Tuesday, May 18, 7:30-8:30 PM, at The Cambridge Homes, 360 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA 02138.

Judy Brown grew up in a small, rural Texas town and went on to become a scientist and educator in New England. Following her career, an interest in photography rekindled her passion for horses.

A series of her photographs, Elliott is featured at The Griffin Museum at the Cambridge Homes, 360 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA, August 6 through October 1. An opening reception is September 18, 6:30-7:30 p.m.

“My admiration and longing for the horse began with a Shetland pony while I was in kindergarten in a small town in Texas,” Brown says. “We had class in front of the teacher’s house; the pony was kept in the back. It appeared each morning to be ridden by each of us for a short distance back and forth. Then it was put away, but remained in my imagination.

“So large and beautiful to my young eye and more important at that age, such fun to ride, this pony became the symbol of the unattainable as I grew up without one of my own, ” Brown says.

Brown attended Rice University and the University of California at Berkeley earning B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in physical chemistry. After nearly three years of postdoctoral work in physics outside Paris, she returned to the states in 1964 to a position in the physics department at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she spent four decades. During half of that she was also a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab studying computer perception of musical signals and later computer classification of marine mammal sounds. Currently Brown, of South Natick MA, is Professor of Physics Emeritus at Wellesley College.

Since taking a Photoshop II class at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2007, she has devoted most of her time to photography, taking two more classes in digital photography at RISD and two studio art classes at Wellesley College.

When a fellow student in a RISD course suggested she take pictures of what she loves for a landscape assignment, she chose horses. “I like doing minimalist images of horses in their stalls where the background is simple and the abstract form of the horse can dominate,” she says.

“I came to appreciate the expressive power of form and texture, used in these abstract images to communicate the unattainable and mysterious qualities of horses,” she says “This set of 18 minimalist images of a spirited pony in his stall were taken with natural lighting against a dark background isolating the form of the pony from his environment.

“They best capture my vision of the spirit and beauty of line of the horse, the ineffable; but are more the product of the occasional luck of the shutter release than a `defining moment’ ” she says. “They are dedicated to my subject, Elliott, the Little Leprechaun’. “

Due to an “overwhelming visual life” that moves at a fast pace, Rich Perry believes people “rarely take the time to appreciate what we see.”

“Using a camera forces a photographer to be aware of those visual images that make up our lives and to stop and reflect on them and see them in a new and meaningful way,” Perry says.

A series of his photographs The Farm is featured at The Griffin Museum at the Cambridge Homes, 360 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA, May 21 through August 5. An opening reception is June 26, 6:30 – 7:30 PM.

Perry says his work “focuses on capturing the extraordinary in the ordinary whether it be created by light, color, and texture, or by human interaction with the environment..Sometimes it is humorous, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes sad, but there is always beauty in it.”

The photos in this exhibit were taken between March 2010 and April 2011 on a small organic farm in Norwich, Vermont, which is self-sustaining “through careful and loving land and animal management,” Perry says.

They were shot over the course of a year, beginning in maple syrup season in late winter and through the full cycle of farming during the four seasons.

“The light in the Vermont hills combined with the textures from the wooden barns and 1780 farmhouse create a warmth and comfort that is reflected back by the animals and the person who lives there,” Perry explains. “I spent a good deal of time just sitting quietly and watching the animal and human cycles of a day and taking in the warm and committed relationship between them. The give-and-take reflects the farmer’s belief that it is the needs of the animals and the land that matter.

“My goal in this series was to capture how that belief is reflected throughout the farm in its animals, its land, its people, and the glow of the love that pervades it.”

Perry, of Lowell, worked many years as a teacher and administrator in public and private education. While still working in a school, he bought a camera and started photographing his granddaughter. Soon, he was taking fine art photographs and enrolled in classes at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. He also has studied at Mass College of Art.

For the last few years, Perry has been concentrating exclusively on photography, both fine art and portraiture.

Rick Colson and his late wife, both psychologists, were concerned “with those themes everyone deals with but often don’t share or talk about; things people are ashamed or embarrassed about. Common experiences everyone has had, one way or another.”

“It seemed important to me to bring some of those things to light, and that is what this project does,” says Colson.

A series of his photographs, Secrets in Plain Sight, is featured at The Griffin Museum at the Cambridge Homes, 360 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA, January 17 through March 11. An opening reception with the artist is January 17, 6:30-7:30 p.m.

The project includes 48 images, some 24 of which are being shown at the Cambridge Homes. This is the first time they are on exhibit.

Colson says the photographs were shot during the past five years throughout New England, in New York and Pennsylvania.

“I was looking for irony,” he says. “Things that stood out as being so common they were ubiquitous or stood out for being so unusual. I am visually drawn to those two extremes.”

Colson then added text to accompany each picture. “The words are my projection of what might be the circumstance of someone in those places or related to those places,” he says.

He also printed all the photographs.

Colson, whose father was a photographer, because serious about taking pictures at age 13. He sold his first print at age 15 and by the time he was 16 was shooting for Boston After Dark, a predecessor to the Boston Phoenix. He also stated shooting album covers, advertising and fashion work for local retailers, and for local television shows.

Colson earned a degree in photo illustration from the Rochester Institute of Technology. He went on to get a degree in clinical psychology from Hiram College, and worked as a mental health counselor.

His interests in design, writing, and communications led him to the Graduate School of Education at Harvard, where he furthered his studies in imaging and received a master’s degree in 1976.

Colson, of Wayland, MA, went on to a long career in marketing, advertising, and consulting. After selling his business in 2003, he began focusing on photography and printing.

He is the founder of EcoVisualLab.com, which is the merger of EcoVisual Communications – a 100 percent “green” large format printmaking organization – and a virtually “green” custom photo “lab.”

He prints on 100 percent cotton paper made from post-industrial reclaimed cotton fibers from cottonseed oil manufacturers. The papers are from local sources, to reduce the greenhouse gas admission associated with transport. And the inks used are VOC-free.

Colson says his father was blinded by exposure to a chemical found in film developers. And, Colson’s wife died of an environmental cancer.

“I could not do photography any more if it hurt the environment or was unhealthy,” he says. “There are a lot of environmental issues in this business. I had to find a way to do it that wasn’t destructive to the environment and people”.