The Griffin Museum@WinCAM

I use photography as a means of connection. I use it to look at my life deeply. When I had my two children, I had a new purpose but felt disconnected from my identity. I dusted off my old Canon DSLR and turned my lens towards my growing family. I started to capture the complexities of childhood and document the messy and tender moments of parenthood. My camera gave me a lens and a voice. I try to uncover beauty in the mundane, examine the agony of growing up,and the pure and simple joys of childhood. Through photography I show the relationship between sisters, the shifting tensions and evolving bond between partners and the intensity of parenthood. I take photos of my family to record and to preserve these fleeting moments as honestly as I can.

About Andrea Zampitella

Andrea Zampitella attended the Massachusetts College of Art where she earned a MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art Education and Studio for Interrelated Media (SIM) and a minor in Small Metals.

Zampitella’s creative reach touches upon sculpture, performance, video, sound design and photography. In her interdisciplinary approach she creates platforms for artists to collaborate with each other. Zampitella has exhibited in galleries and public spaces around Boston including the Decordova Museum and Sculpture Park, The Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, The Boston Children’s Museum, Axiom Gallery, Mobius Gallery and the Griffin Museum of Photography. Currently, she is a Library/Media Specialist at Winchester High School. As an educator, Andrea promotes the cross-pollination of disciplines in her classroom encouraging students to invent and develop experimental art forms.

Zampitella has been mentored by multimedia artists Megan and Murray McMillan, Mary Mattingly and Ellen Wetmore. She has received grants from Massachusetts College of Art, The Boston Children’s Museum, The Winchester Cultural Council, and The Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy.

The Griffin @ WinCam is located at 32 Swanton St in Winchester, MA. Hours are Monday through Friday 11am to 5pm. You can see more about WINCAM on their website.

The Griffin Museum is excited to present an exhibition by Nick Ortoleva, featuring photographs exploring identity, memory, place and family ties. This exhibition is located at our satellite location Griffin @ WinCam, located in Winchester through June 29, 2025.

It’s been 22 years since I’ve been in Korea. It’s been 22 years since I’ve taken a breath of  this hot humid air. It’s been 22 years since I’ve heard the bustle of the busy city streets filled with vendors and buses and cars whizzing by. I don’t remember my time here, but know that I was here for three months before I boarded a plane leaving Incheon International Airport to Logan Airport in Boston. 

I look to the photographs Mom took on her trip, to get Thomas, my younger brother, from her trip here 18 years ago. I use her fading, 4×6″ prints on some old drug store RC paper 

as these points of reference as I continue to map out the city for myself. Amongst trying to sort out the rush of feelings in the place I was born, I continue to walk, landmark to landmark. As I stomp through the late summer heat, I stop to make notes and photograph, to expand the visual map of the city I have set out to make. I follow an itinerary my map guides me through, stopping into markets and parks to continue to familiarize myself with new sights and smells.

As a note taker, image maker, and writer, I sift and reflect on my experience through notes I’ve jotted down and personal essays, to keep record of my own story and write my piece. My place of origin is a piece of me that I had little information on. Something that I was certain about is that in returning to Seoul to learn about, observe, and understand the contemporary landscape would allow me to continue to discover what place can hold for the individual.

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Nick Ortoleva (b. Seoul, Korea) grew up in Central Massachusetts and currently resides in Boston. He received a BFA in Photography from MassArt (24’). 
Ortoleva uses the camera to shape a fragmented narrative that often reflects on personal experiences and  relationships with the communities where he has found kinship. He frequently revisits stories passed down through family, as he continues to write a memoir of his own; warping perception, color, and light. In his most recent work, he explores family archives and returns to Seoul for the first time meditating on what place can hold for the individual, as a means to discover Oneself.

The Griffin @ WinCam is located at 22 Swanton Street in Winchester at WinCam (Winchester Community Access and Media) Hours of opening – 11am to 7pm Monday thru Thursday / 11am to 5pm Friday. Closed on Weekends.

The Body Project are a series of twelve self-portrait collaborations between photographers Melinda McIntyre and Lisa Spencer. Viewed individually, each image is an examination of individual body parts. When combined together as a diptych, the photographs create a new, more intimate dialogue. Some of the diptychs seem to suggest an actual dialogue between the two panels, while others play with shape, tension, and formal comparison. 

To create the diptychs, the artists shot one body part at a time in weekly installations. The images were produced without discussion or posing direction in separate workspaces 5,000 miles apart. The images were then revealed and combined as diptychs, with the one artist’s work augmenting, reinforcing, or changing the narrative of the other, often in playful and surprising ways. 

While the project was originally designed as a self-portrait exercise – a depiction of the unsexualized, feminine form through the purely female lens – it quickly became a bonding experience and a trust exercise, as each artist learned to trust the other and trust the process of finding the narrative “between” photos. And while it was a coincidence that the two artists shared a similar hair type, skin tone, and body shape, it added an extra layer of interest to the project, as it was often hard for viewers (even the artist’s own parents) to distinguish who was who. Because the artists’ view and treatment of their own likeness is likely to change with age, Melinda and Lisa have committed to revisiting the project each decade.  This is Installment #1: The Thirties.

Melinda McIntyre is a photographer who recently repatriated to the US after 13 years abroad. Primarily a self-portrait and motherhood artist, Melinda takes pictures to “explore her role as an expat and mother in an ever-changing environment” as her family follows life in the Foreign Service. Her work has been featured in N- Magazine, Digital Camera Magazine, Click, The Foreign Service Journal, and This Detailed Life.  She is a juried member of the photography communities Click Pro and Hello Storyteller and has written and co-produced two self-paced courses – The Creative Collab and the Self Portrait Collab –  through Hello Storyteller platform. This is her first exhibition.

Lisa Spencer is a photographer, writer, and workshop leader based in Winchester, MA. She specializes in documentary storytelling. Named “Best Boudoir Photographer of 2024” by Click Magazine, her work has been featured in books, magazines, and online news content, including Winchester News. She is a juried member of the photography communities Click Pro and Hello Storyteller, and co-curator of the exhibit “Textures of Light” at the Viridian Moon Art Gallery in Bloomington, IN, an exhibition of fine art photography.  Her work has been selected for display at the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts and is currently on view in Winchester, MA as part of the “Our Town” exhibition.

The Griffin is pleased to present the vision of Frank Siteman at our satellite gallery at WinCam. Soaring above the earth, Frank captures our imagination with his view from above New England. These vibrant abstracts engage our imagination with what is and is not to scale.

Frank Siteman was born in St. Louis in 1947. He attended Tufts University, where he majored in chemistry. Already immersed in photography, he shot portraits of the entire college faculty in exchange for his tuition.  He soon received an assignment to photograph an annual report for a Boston area rehab hospital, and taught in a Boston youth project. Following his graduation from Tufts, where he launched the photography department through the Experimental College, he began teaching at the Roxbury Latin School, the Orson Welles Film School, Simmons College, and the Art Institute of Boston.  During this time, he discovered the world of stock photography. Over the next several decades, he worked steadily shooting stock and completing commercial assignments, shooting the world while traveling. His photographs found their way into agencies, which sold them for a myriad of uses in magazines, advertising, annual reports, multi-media shows and textbooks. He continues to photograph the world and the people around him, living alternately in Winchester, MA and the White Mountains of NH.

The Griffin @ WinCam is located at 32 Swanton Street, Winchester, MA 01890

The gallery is free and open to the public during WinCAM’s regular hours of operation and while the room is not otherwise reserved. It’s best to call ahead at 781-721-2050.

About Xuan Hui Ng

My name is Xuan Hui. I am from Singapore and currently live in Tokyo.

I began photographing as a form of self-therapy. I was grieving the loss of my mother to cancer.  She had been both my confidante and my moral compass. Losing her plunged me into a downward spiral until a chance encounter with nature set me on my path to recovery.  Its vastness gave me a sense of perspective while its beauty reignited in me a sense of wonder and adventure.  It reminded me that life is beautiful, that there is so much to live for and to explore.

Initially, the urge to photograph stemmed from an almost desperate desire to prolong the serenity that nature brought.  Over time, I began to enjoy simply being in the embrace of the forests, lakes and meadows.  The Chinese idiom “天时地利人和”  speaks to the importance of fortuitous timing (天时), favorable conditions (地利) and the human resolve (人和) to our endeavors.  I think this is especially true for my photography because my images are a collaborative effort with nature.  I am grateful to be blessed with serendipitous encounters and would like to share these precious tokens of memories with others. 

Nature has been pivotal to my own healing and growth.  I dedicate my images to kindred spirits, the weary, the lost and the lonesome. I hope that they can experience the joy I felt when I laid my eyes on these magical landscapes.

Xuan-Hui Ng is a photographic artist from Singapore who currently resides in Japan. Her work is represented by Foto Relevance gallery in Houston, Texas, with her debut solo show Interludes in 2021. Her solo exhibition, Transcendence: Awakening the Soul, at the Griffin Museum of Photography will take place in December 2023.

Ng has been a Critical Mass Finalist in 2021, 2022, and 2023. Her work has been juried into exhibitions at the Davis Orton Gallery, Southeast Center for Photography, Texas Photographic Society, New York Center for Photographic Art, and Fotonostrum’s 17th and 18th Pollux Awards. She is the winner of both series and single image in the Nature category at the 20^th Julia Margaret Cameron Award. She has been an artist lecturer at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Nobechi Creative, Artquest Photo Workshops and various camera clubs. Publications of her work have been featured in What Will You Remember?, fotoMAGAZIN, PetaPixel, ON landscape, forum naturfotografie, Dodho Magazine, CURIOUS Photo blog, Float Magazine, Feature Shoot and Popular Photography (大众摄影）.

In 2022, she was interviewed by BBC World Service’s Cultural Frontline on “Creativity and Mental Health.” She is a contributor to ELEMENTS landscape photography magazine and an instructor for Santa Fe Workshops.

She graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Griffin Museum is pleased to host Jake Benzinger’s Like Dust Settling in a Dim-lit Room (Or Starless Forest) in our satellite WinCAM gallery.

Artist Statement

Like Dust Settling in a Dim-lit Room (Or Starless Forest) constructs a liminal world that explores the intersection of reality, dream, and memory. Through photography, this body of work functions as a mirror, a reflection of my inner psyche and an investigation of identity, relationships, the domestic, and the natural world.

This process, with its focus on the self, is rooted in an attempt to heal. The exploration of ordinary locations, places devoid of people and often characterized by the presence of flora, have functioned as a refuge in my personal life. By frequenting these places, I began to see them as sets, utilizing them to construct my visions. I imbue them with fragments of the people, places, and memories that inhabit my subconscious.

I fail to find stability in the societal constructs of home and family; so I seek to create it in the natural world. Through the dislocation of these places and the infusion of nature into the domestic, this work constructs a fleeting world that lives in ambiguity. This space is familiar yet still foreign; it is a constructed world that visualizes my deepest desires and greatest fears.

About

Jake Benzinger (he/him) is a photographer and book artist based in Rockland, Maine; he received his BFA in photography from Lesley University, College of Art and Design in Cambridge, MA. His work explores the intersection of dreamscape and reality. Through the dislocation of space, he weaves together imagery to construct a world that exists in the liminal, investigating themes of duality, longing, identity, and the natural world.

He is currently a gallery assistant at Blue Raven Gallery and recently had work featured by Fraction Magazine, alongside exhibiting both internationally and in the greater Boston area. His most recent body of work, Like Dust Settling in a Dim-Lit Room (Or Starless Forest), was recently self-published and has sold out of its first edition hardcover books, with a second coming in November, 2023.

I view land as firm, solid and reliable – our principal habitat.  Conversely, I recognize that water is literally fluid and equally vital to our existence.  It’s hard to envision how water, which is so physically compliant in many ways, can supersede, overpower, and ultimately reshape the land.  Water scarcity creates new deserts — where life struggles or fails to exist at all.  

Using silver nitrate and cyanotype (made with sea water), I experiment with methods of applying the chemistry (sea sponges, for example) to paper and the overall process (layering paper).  Through this, I attempt to explore the relationships of land and water which are now changing more frequently and deeply — with greater consequence to all living things. 

My mammalian brain is disquieted.  My regional habitat now vacillates between drought and deluge.   I see the living world struggle as it attempts to evolve.  Land is revealed or deposited, water carves new pathways and erodes the land.  

About Connie Lowell

A native New Englander, Connie Lowell has spent much of her adult life in a cubicle, staring at a screen or if fortunate, out a window.  Feeling disconnected from the natural outdoor world, she developed a passion for nature’s systems and the connections within and among species over the course of time.  Lowell frequently finds herself preoccupied with the many and varied changes humanity has introduced within the natural environment.  Residing now in New Hampshire, Lowell’s work strives to reflect nature or the natural processes by employing a variety of mechanisms and methods to capture, print and create visual, photographic art works. Lowell’s works have been selected for numerous juried shows across the US and has appeared in the Boston Globe and ArtScope Magazine in relation to exhibits.  The images Lowell creates explore humanity and our relationship to the natural world as well as investigating our fellow occupants and the relationships among us all.

THE POWER OF THREE

Make it different. Keep it the same. It just takes three pictures to start and confirm a pathway.  There are
no winners: no bronze, silver, or gold medals. They’re all equal and yet all different. With a pathway the
next pictures are always a surprise. Sameness provides consistency; difference the accumulation that
creates chronology. The power of three can also operate with projects over time. It’s the way the
audiences we never meet get to know our work, reaching them with something new in every picture and
every new project while still being the same photographer. It’s the way we see the world that becomes
the unifier, the pathway marker. In this exhibition, seven pathways are presented with seven texts by me.
– Arno Rafael Minkkinen

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We look forward to seeing you on Thursday May 25th for a celebration with the artists at Griffin @ WinCam

The Griffin @ WinCam is located in Winchester, at 32 Swanton Road, Winchester, MA 01890

The WinCam Gallery hours are Monday: 11am – 7pmTuesday: 11am – 7pm Wednesday: 11am – 7pm Thursday: 1pm – 9pm Friday: 1pm – 7pm Saturday: 10am – 3pm select Saturdays. Call for availability. (781) 721-2050

Learn more about the artists included in the Power of Three

Leah Abrahams –

LEAH ABRAHAMS – THE MISSING PIECE OF THE PUZZLE
Like a long-lost missing piece of a puzzle that suddenly pops up from under a carpet, the photographs of Leah Abrahams defy classification. Subject matter entails everything from everywhere all at once, as this year’s Oscar winner would have it. Or they could be like treasures—an isolated spoon, a teacup with the wrong sauce—from a hide-away thrift shop in Leesburg, Florida, a town filled with eclectic images around every corner, just about any random town where  everything is brand new will do. Pathway? You bet. If consistency is the goal, eclecticism meets it head on because every picture will always be different and never the same. The consistency of difference becomes the Power of Three to create the pathway. If you’re always late, you’re on time kind of thing. Predictability is the formula. Repetition without repetition. Same but different. Only for that to be of interest, every image needs to grab us with its own power, be it beauty, ugliness, point of view, or whatever attribute it strikes us with. It takes a certain amount of daring and risk taking to create such islands and stand by them, trust them as Leah Abrahams does with confidence and grace.

For eclecticism to take place, discovery, and invention both play a part. The Pacific Ocean was always there; it just needed to be discovered. Invention reassembles what is known and uses it to create the new. The eclectic work of
Abrahams sits on the fulcrum of that constantly oscillating invention-discovery see-saw (see=invent; saw= discover). It assumes the past, the present, and the future are but part of life’s drive-through. And then there is that puzzle piece, so impossible to know what extends from it. Where it fits in? Where do I fit in? So, what better way to organize a response to the existential nature of one’s
universe than creating a body of work that celebrates it all?
© Arno Rafael Minkkinen, 2023

… [Read More]

The Eurocentric tradition of still life has a long history of appropriating elements from cultures that it considered “exotic” while maintaining  authoritative artistic dominance on the practice. In response, Open Flowers Bear Fruit (Asian American Still Life) is an on-going project that claims space in this venerated tradition for Asian American cultural experiences, directly from an Asian American perspective. The project creates an overdue dialogue between the symbology of Eurocentric still life with that of Asian diaspora traditions.

On a personal level, the series features home comfort foods from my upbringing as a Taiwanese-Chinese American—foods that are derided as “strange” in the U.S. but hold quotidian significance in Chinese culture. At the same time, the series questions the ideals of the nostalgic “All-American” experience as a daughter of immigrants, asking to what extent immigrant experiences can dovetail with notions of Americanness. On a community level, I partner with Asian American small business owners throughout the series, foregrounding their food practices that make up the now multicultural culinary landscape that pervades California. These partnerships have allowed me to present perspectives and lived experiences from the numerous cultures that feed the otherwise monolithic label of “Asian American.”

About Stephanie Shih –

Stephanie Shih is a visual still life artist, known for her painterly use of shadow applied to playful perspectives on food. Shih started making photographs with her dad’s half-frame camera on childhood road trips, but only took up photography seriously later in life while in graduate school. At the time, she moonlighted as a caterer, and translating the experience of food to the visual image has been a driving through line of her work ever since.

As a second generation Taiwanese-Chinese American, Shih explores themes of cultural dynamics—belonging,alienation, appropriation, celebration—through her still life photographs. Shih’s photography has been featured in print outlets including Elle Girl Korea, 7×7, and Gastronomica, and online on Gourmet Live,, Saveur, Fine Cooking, and Buzzfeed.

Shih is from the San Francisco Bay Area and currently lives in Los Angeles. When not in the studio or kitchen creating, she is a professor at University of Southern California.

The Griffin @ WinCam is located in Winchester, at 32 Swanton Road, Winchester, MA 01890

The WinCam Gallery hours are Monday: 11am – 7pmTuesday: 11am – 7pm Wednesday: 11am – 7pm Thursday: 1pm – 9pm Friday: 1pm – 7pm Saturday: 10am – 3pm select Saturdays. Call for availability. (781) 721-2050

I like to explore the world at night. Night lighting with its mix of sources and colors, makes the commonplace magical. There is often a peace and serenity in the dark: An opportunity to see and experience things differently.
I add lighting to my images. Sometimes I add flourishes of light or draw in elements. Sometimes the subjects are so dark that I need to light them, for the camera to capture them. Sometimes the light itself becomes the subject.
These images are from a project titled “Becoming Light”. They show transformation from stillness to motion, from dark to light, from body to energy.
Light painting has a performance element to it; in that respect it is like dance. Gesture and awareness of body in space are important. My movements and my lighting bring different elements to life, painting the picture.

About the Artist –

Lisa Ryan is a night photographer and light painter.  The influence of her fine arts education can be seen in her use of light to draw and paint. Working with various light tools she incorporates gestures and movement. In addition to lighting landscapes at night, she creates scenes, including clothing the figure and creating night gardens from light.

Ryan’s photographs have been exhibited in shows presented by the Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester MA, the Center for Photographic Art, Carmel CA and in many juried exhibits throughout the US.  She has curated group exhibits of night photography at the Front Street Gallery, Scituate MA and at the Art Complex Museum, Duxbury MA.

Her images have been featured in print and digital publications including NASA’s APOD, “RechargeTheArts”, a juried group exhibition on Instagram, Fraction Magazine, and The Literate Image.

Ryan has been co-organizer of the Greater Boston Night Photographers Meetup since 2014.