The Griffin Museum at Digital Silver Imaging

Charter Weeks

Realometer: 50 Years of America

March 7 – May 12, 2017

reception is April 20, 2017 from 6-8

As an art student in the 1960’s studying with Harry Callahan at the Rhode Island School of Design, Charter Weeks got a fundamental grounding in the technical and structural elements of image making. The influences of Callahan, Steichen’s Family of Man, Walker Evans, Weston, Adams and others of the time “shaped every element of his photography and sustained his desire to say something useful with his photographs.”

Week’s series, Realometer: 50 Years of America, is featured in the Griffin’s satellite gallery, The Griffin@Digital Silver Imaging from March 7 through May 12, 2017. A reception will take place on April 20, 2017 from 6­-8pm. The reception is free and open to the public.

Independent Curator J. Sybylla Smith has been working with Charter Weeks to bring this exhibition to the gallery. “Charter and I met during the New England Portfolio Reviews where he introduced me to his expansive curiosity via an eclectic batch of black and white images spanning years, continents and subjects,” Smith said. “Charter gladly furnished back-stories with a sharp memory for detail and an obvious delight. Fast-forward a year of culling his vast archives, and you have, Realometer: 50 Years of America, a glimmer of Charter’s empathic eye,” she said.

In his book Walden, Hendy David Thoreau writes about the existence of an imagined instrument called the realometer that is capable of measuring the extent of reality inherent in one’s perceptions. He says the purpose of the instrument is to move us beyond the “mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance … to a hard bottom.” Smith says, “Weeks’ photographs are this hard bottom.” She continues, “Charter Weeks has spent 50-plus years mining, illuminating and recording from vantage points around the globe. From the window of his lower East Side tenement in New York during the 1960’s to the back roads of the Carolinas where he made it his mission to chronicle the impact of the 2008 recession, Charter has consistently kept a measured eye on the evolving landscape of his homeland, America. Here is a multi-decade glimpse of his honed humanistic vision – full of our shared painful, wonderful, absurd reality.”

Charter Weeks studied with Harry Callahan in 1961. He graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 1964 with a degree in art and went on to study film making at the London School of Film Technique. He returned to the US and worked as a commercial photographer in New York City in the late 1960s shooting for ad agencies, magazines and the music industry. He was also a partner in Chicago Films producing documentaries and working for the BBC shooting news and documentary subjects. Weeks lived in Japan for 18 months teaching design and photography at Friends World College in Hiroshima and returned to the US in 1972 to build his own home in a rural community. He had various jobs from framing carpenter to film editor and in 1981 started his own business as a free lance photographer and owner of Isinglass Marketing, an Industrial and Business to Business marketing and communications company, which he still runs.

Sean Kernan was looking for experience not photographs when he happened upon a small boxing club in Kampala, Uganda. His involvement with this place and its people captured his attention, he began photographing and his method of shooting and seeing was challenged. “For me the great gift of the place was that it did not allow any of my visual habits to operate,” says Kernan. “I had to intuit when to swing a camera around at the last moment to catch something I’d seen out of the corner of my eye. I was cut off from constructs and ideas and projected into a realm of pure seeing.”
Sean Kernan’s series, Kampala Boxing Club, is featured in the Griffin’s satellite gallery, The Griffin@Digital Silver Imaging, from January 11th through March 3rd 2017. A reception will take place on January 19, 2017 from 6­8pm. The reception is free and open to the public.

Kernan says, “The room itself had an austerity that was almost monastic. The ring was wood planking worn smooth as the floor of a Zen temple by years of shuffling feet. The air was frenetic with shouts and blows, the smell of sweat and dust, sound of music and honking from the street outside, gold-colored light flung like buckets of color against the walls.” He goes on, “In the seeming chaos there was purpose in the clash of strategies and bodies. This was a place where a poor boy from Africa could make a chance for himself using just his body and his determination.”
Sean Kernan is a widely exhibited photographer, writer and pioneering teacher. He is the author of three monographs; The Secret Books, (with Jorge Luis Borges), Among Trees, (with Anthony Doerr), and Darrell Petit: In Stone. His explorations of creativity and photography have been published as “Looking into the Light: Creativity and the Photographer.” He collaborated with Choreographer Alison Chase in a theater/dance/, multimedia piece “Drowned,” at MASS MoCA and the Miller Theater in New York. He has produced two film documentaries, The Kampala Boxing Club, about boxing in Africa, and Crow Stories, about the Crow Tribe in Montana.

His exhibitions of photography include: Centre Regional de la Photography, France; The Alexandrian Library, Egypt; William Benton Museum, Connecticut; Sala Bustos, Kunsthaus Santa Fe, and Museo de la Ciudat, Mexico; Wesleyan University, Connecticut and the Whitney Museum, New York. His photographs have been published in the “New York Times Magazine,” “Smithsonian,” “New York Magazine,” “Bloomberg Business,” “Communication Arts,” “Graphis,” and in magazines in China, Iran, Italy and Switzerland. He has taught and lectured at the New School/Parsons, Art Center Pasadena, Yale Medical School, ICP, University of Texas, and both the Maine and Santa Fe workshops. He has written for “Communication Arts,” “Graphis,” “Lenswork,” among others.

Roger Archibald, Ben Arnon, Bill Betcher, John Bunzick, Christopher Chadbourne, Bill Clark, Cattie Coyle, Margo Cooper, Joe Greene, Beth Hankes, Cynthia Johnston, Greg Jundanian, Uday Khambadkone, Lee Kilpatrick, Eliot Schildkrout, Andy Schirmer, Jean Schnell, Dianne Schaefer, Ellen Slotnick, Cindy Weisbart, Lincoln Williams, and Kalman Zabarsky

Joshua Sariñana’s photographs are representations of his travels back in time to memories from the past and present. These images allude to his early adulthood memories of love, wonder and isolation. Sariñana says that using imagery to ignite feelings that are difficult to confront, can provide a nostalgic relief as one grows.

Sariñana’s series, Prosopagnosia, is featured in the Griffin’s satellite gallery, The Griffin@Digital Silver Imaging, from October 4th through December 4th, 2016. A reception will take place on November 10, 2016 from 6­8pm. The reception is free and open to the public.

“As a neuroscientist, I know that memories are inaccurate,” says Sariñana. “Whenever a memory is recalled it is changed. Brain regions become reactivated when a meaningful cue (the smell of a loved ones t-shirt, a melancholy song, a picture of a childhood friend) presents itself. The reactivated brain becomes susceptible to change for a shorts time, allowing new information or feelings to be inserted and integrated into our past experiences or potentially peeled away from psychological access,” he says.

Sariñana obtained his neuroscience degrees at the University of California and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but is currently a writer and fine arts photographer. Joshua’s photography has been exhibited nationally and internationally. His work has been shown at the SoHo Art house, the Houston Center for Photography, the Mobile Camera Club Gallery in Paris, and at Photo Independent in Los Angeles. Joshua work has been featured on Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post, and “Time Magazine”. Most recently, he has been published in the photography publications Don’t Take Pictures and The Smart View. He has been interviewed on various blogs such as like Vice Magazine.

Paul Wainwright’s photographs interprets images of landscapes and historic architecture. Colonial meetinghouses, circa 1700s, were the center of both religious and civic life. Many were built with tax money, and their simple, undecorated architecture reflected the desire of early Puritan settlers to live simple lives apart from the Church of England. Yet these were their “cathedrals,” built by hand without adornment. Only a few of them remain in a relatively unchanged state. These structures not only present a fascinating glimpse into our nation’s colonial history, but are beautiful as well.

Wainwright’s series, A Space for Faith: The Colonial Meetinghouses of New England, is featured in the Griffin Satellite Gallery at Digital Silver Imaging July 26th through September 30th, 2016. An opening reception will take place on September 14, 2016 from 6­8pm. The reception is free and open to the public.

“I approach meetinghouses in much the same way an artist who works with the human form approaches a model,” Wainwright says. “It is not important what the person’s name is. Rather, the artist sees in the model a quality that can, when properly posed and lit, yield a piece of art. These meetinghouses are my “models” for making art, and my photographs reflect my emotional response to them–my physical location when I made each photograph is not of primary importance.”

Wainwright is a fine art, large format black & white photographer who lives and works in Atkinson, New Hampshire. He specializes in traditional, wet process photography. Even though, Wainwright earned his PhD in physics from Yale University, he is now dedicated to photography full­time. Wainwright has shown his work in numerous solo and juried shows, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, and Panopticon Gallery in Boston. His work is in collections of private and corporate collectors including Peabody Essex Museum, Boston Public Library, and Fidelity Investments.

Ron Cowie
In early 2008, my wife Lisa Garner died suddenly leaving me with our 3 1/2 year old daughter. Lisa was always rather protective of her “stuff”. In short, I wasn’t allowed to touch any of it. After she died, I still had the same reservations. In 2009, I had reconnected with someone whom I knew would be sharing a life and future with. I was confronted by the real need to touch Lisa’s stuff.

I remember standing in the master closet, looking at Lisa’s side and saying out loud “I’m not trying to push you out but, I need to make room and; I don’t know how to do that. So, you tell me what I should do and I’ll do that.”

I heard Lisa’s clear voice in my head “Photograph my things in wet-plate and print them in platinum.”

The lesson is “careful what you put out there” because Lisa had a lot of stuff and wet-plate collodion is a fairly tedious process to do well. However, it was the perfect solution. She was often right about what was good for me.

During the spring and summer of 2009 I spent my days polishing glass, pouring collodion, and setting up items to photograph. The process of making a single image could, at times, take an entire day from set up to final varnishing. This time allowed me to interact with the items in front of my lens. I was actually talking to Lisa through my camera. It was a beautiful, creative collaboration with the woman who taught me to love and be patient. I would not have known how to proceed without her input. This project was her gift to me.

Bill Vaccaro
It was the summer of 1995 when my first wife suddenly died. Our adopted son was only 2-1/2 years old. While we eventually were able to achieve some sense of normalcy in our lives after years of grief and loss, it was never easy for him to deal with the feeling that, to use his own words, that he “was robbed.” Our son, now a young adult, remembers little about the person who he calls his “old mom.”

Several months after her death, I gathered together many of her favorite things and put them in an old storage chest donated by close friends. These included diaries, sketchbooks, favorite jewelry, photographs, things she sewed and knitted – even the very possessions she carried with her the day she died – so he could have something that truly belonged to her, even as he struggled to remember this now mysterious person who had loved him so dearly.

But how does one visually depict those fragments of memory that remain when someone so young loses a parent and all that’s left are her treasured possessions. I chose to combine the wet plate collodion process with alternative print processes to show what it might be like to see through the eyes of a child still struggling to recall a significant part of his past that’s been clouded forever by the relentlessness of time.

Norm Diamond
I became fascinated with estate sales over a year ago during my first visit. They have become a common way for people to dispose of their parents’ possessions after they die or move to assisted living. Now I go to numerous sales every week in Dallas, where I live. In addition to photographing at the sales themselves, I also buy items, usually spending less than $25. I then photograph them in my home studio with various lighting and backgrounds, which allows me to construct different interpretations.

Several themes have emerged from this work. The stark reality of life’s brevity pervades every estate sale, where children’s toys sit a few feet from wheelchairs. I search for unique personal possessions, which tell the often poignant stories of people I never knew and can only wonder about. When these items become subjects in photographs, they begin to take on a new life of their own. In addition, I also find knickknacks which offer fascinating visual commentaries on our culture and politics. Every weekend at just about every sale, I see sadness, irony, history, and humor.

Estate sales also evoke strong emotional connections to my past. I think of my parents and the treasured belongings they left for my sister and me. I reflect upon my mortality, the choices I have made, and the dreams I never pursued. And, I wonder what my estate sale will look like.

In late 2015, I invited ten photographers to participate in a limited edition portfolio for the museum. A print from the museum’s founder Arthur Griffin was also included. The photographers are: Caleb Cole, Blake Fitch, Matthew Gamber, Arthur Griffin, Stella Johnson, Lou Jones, Brian Kaplan, Asia Kepka, Greer Muldowney, Neal Rantoul and Aline Smithson.

The portfolio is not a definitive study on photography, rather it is a sampling of contemporary photographers who have made their mark on the medium and have contributed greatly to shaping the spirit of the museum. In my thinking about these eleven photographers I chose images that seemed to hold together as a collective parcel and would continue to endure.

Paula Tognarelli
Executive Director and curator
Griffin Museum of Photography

Massachusetts-based photographer and educator Marky Kauffmann’s photographs are inspired by her love of nature and of the land.

In Landscapes and Prayers Kauffmann’s images display a sense of peace, harmony and order, but also tension, destruction and chaos, as it exists in the natural world. “The story of these landscapes begins with my maternal grandmother, who studied the art of ikebana flower arranging while living in Japan at the end of World War II,” says Kauffmann. “As a child, I was completely captivated by my grandmother’s flower arrangements. Her use of line, shape, pattern, texture, color, symmetry and asymmetry seduced and mesmerized me. And so, as an adult, I became an arranger, too,” she says.

A series of Marky Kauffmann’s photographs called Landscapes and Prayers, is featured at the Griffin Museum at Digital Silver Imaging, 9 Brighton St., Belmont, MA, on January 15, 2016 through March 11, 2016. An opening reception with the artist will take place February 18, 2016 from 6-8 p.m.

Marky Kauffmann is a graduate of Boston University and the New England School of Photography. She has been working as a fine-art photographer and educator for more than thirty years. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including two Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship Finalist grants. Most recently, she won First Place in Soho Photo Gallery’s National Alternative Processes Competition, and was a finalist in the 7th Edition Julia Margaret Cameron Worldwide Gala Awards in three categories, including fine art, portraiture, and landscapes photography.

Kauffmann has taught photography at numerous secondary schools, including Buckingham Brown and Nichols School, Shady Hill School, Dana Hall School, Milton Academy and Weston High School. She also spent twenty years teaching photography to adults as part of the New England School of Photography’s Evening Workshop Program. Currently she teaches at Milton Academy’s Saturday Course.

Albuquerque-based photographer and educator Meggan Gould’s photographs are often fashioned from her considerations of vision and how we look at the world at large as well as how photography is used to document and speak to our surroundings. In “Viewfinders” Gould focuses on the camera apparatus itself. “Histories of looking are embedded in the [viewfinder] glass in the form of dust and scratches; etched and painted lines and text discipline and direct our sight,” says Gould. “Viewfinders are meant to be looked through,” she says. “What happens if our vision is arrested at these thresholds?” she asks. She answers, “Each camera becomes a miniature universe.”

A series of Meggan Gould’s photographs called “Viewfinders,” is featured at the Griffin Museum at Digital Silver Imaging, 9 Brighton St., Belmont, MA, on October 15, 2015 through December 31, 2015. An opening reception will take place November 5, 2015 from 6-8 p.m.

Meggan Gould is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of New Mexico. She received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts – Dartmouth, and her BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She studied and taught photography at Speos, Paris Photographic Institute. Her photographs have been featured in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. She was a resident artist at Light Work in 2009.

The music revolution was a vital and integral component of the sixties San Francisco art scene. Herb Greene photographed the rock musicians and other members of San Francisco’s cultural milieu during the height of its creative productivity. Greene, a friend of many of San Francisco’s most influential musicians, worked as few photographers have: not as a documenter from the outside, but as a participant within the music scene he was photographing.

Many of Greene’s photographs have become signature portraits of these musicians. His revealing portraits of The Jefferson Airplane, Jeff Beck, The Pointer Sisters, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, Carlos Santana, Sly Stone, Rod Stewart and many others helped create astonishing family album for an entire generation.

A series of Greene’s photographs featuring the Grateful Dead called “Dead 50 Years,” is featured at the Griffin Museum at Digital Silver Imaging, 9 Brighton St., Belmont, MA, on September 21, 2015 through October 9, 2015. An opening reception will take place October 1, 2015 from 6-8 p.m. There will be live music, very light fare and a wine tasting at the opening reception.

Writer, Matt Nannis writes about Herb Greene and his photos of the Grateful Dead in an essay called “Language of the Dead.” He says, “The collected work of one Herb Greene dances upon.…pages comprised [of] ones and zeroes in such a manifest as never before seen. The emotions, the moments, the good times and the hardships of a storied guild of brothers that put the music and those willing to respond to [music] before all other things. Herb Greene was there when the fellowship was spread across Palo Alto. He was there at the peak when they were at their best and most illustrious. He was there at the beginning when they were their subtlest and unostentatious. He captured the glory that sang from their lips and their instruments.”