The Virtual Gallery

Statement
I first became fascinated by the complexity of the home as I observed rows and rows of old Dutch colonial structures, while working on my first book, Pabean Passage. These old colonial structures showed a distinct East-Indies architecture, an adaptation of European architecture to the tropical climate of Indonesia, which gained its popularity in the mid 18th century.

Growing up in two major cities contributed a lot to this project. Born in Makassar, I also live in Surabaya for the most part of my life. What makes this project special is that I tried to capture those places from my experiences of growing up in the two cities.

Built in the early 1900s by Chinese immigrants and based on a European design, these buildings show distinct East-Indies characteristics on the outside, while being infused with an assimilation of Chinese and Indonesian culture.

As I entered those houses, I felt the air of familiarity, a connection with the harmonious combination of two distinctive cultures that I was brought up under. Born as a third-generation Chinese-Indonesian, I was raised under the influence of the Chinese culture that my grandparents brought from the old world, while at the same time being schooled in a mainly Indonesian setting by my Indonesian-born parents.

Walking into those historic houses sparked my interest to discover more about the roots of my own cultural heritage. I felt my amazement turned into an aspiration to comprehend the lives of these Chinese- Indonesians, along with the challenges they faced to preserve their own culture while living in a whole new world. In Indonesia, there is this notion of family home, a place where history, culture, and tradition still live for generations. Just as the proverb says, “A house is built with boards and beams, a home is built with love and dreams,” these family homes have become a testimony of the evolution of Chinese-Indonesian cultures and traditions.

For many Chinese-Indonesians, their family home was (or still is) a place for business. Packed with merchandise, and various items collected over the years by the owners, these family homes silently tell their stories. They tell the stories about love and dreams, opportunities and challenges, laughter and tears of those who have called them home.

Home Sweet Home is a one-year journey into the evolution of the Chinese-Indonesian culture. It is the story of a harmonious marriage of two beautiful cultures, three centuries in-the-making. It was not a journey without obstacles, but it certainly was one with countless rewards. What began as a challenge to obtain the owners’ consent to photograph their homes has later proved to be a beginning of new friendships. The challenge to find the appropriate houses to shoot had presented me with the privilege of listening to countless stories that offer valuable lessons in life.

As I embarked on this journey, I have discovered that there is more to a home than what meets the eyes. Beyond the evidence of economical, functional, or sentimental hoarding. Beyond the cluttered halls or the neatly- organized storage rooms. Beyond the simplicity of aging and the glitters of luxury.

There is a story in each frame, hope and dreams embedded and encrypted beneath the layers of objects that fill the space. Walls displaying pictures of joyous achievements and traumatic miseries, the good-old days and the modern reality that stole their thunder.

A home is more than merely a dwelling place, it is a monument where stories are carved and histories are made. Whether it is an aging third-generation family home or a modern private home, there is this air of familiarity, a connection, a deep sense of longing. A pride in calling it a Home Sweet Home. -AG

Bio
Anton Gautama began taking pictures with a mobile phone. Since 2015 he has been working professionally as photographer with a passionate focus on documentary photography. He believes that the essence of the medium is the ability to help us understand life. Gautama seeks unique moments that generate powerful emotional responses. With patience and determination, the photographer often immerses himself for months at a single location pursuing his photographic observations.

The photographs from Anton Gautama have been featured in several online and printed magazine platforms since 2016, such as “LensCulture” and “National Geographic Travel.” His works have been exhibited solo at the Goethe Institute – Jakarta, Indonesian Institute of Art – Jogjakarta. Gautama’s photographs have received numerous international awards, including in international photo festivals. His first monograph Pabean Passage, published in 2016, reveals the milieu of traditional Indonesian spice markets through intimate colour street photography.

In October 2015 Anton Gautama opened a private photo gallery in Malang in order to share his passion of photography. In keeping with his interest in exploring and preserving Indonesian culture, he also restored a full set of Javanese gamelan and placed it inside the gallery.

Born as a fourth son in 1969 in Makassar, South Sulawesi, Indonesia, Anton Gautama is based in Surabaya, Master in Business Administration from Hawaii Pacific University, USA, and is also the founder of ALFALINK, a prominent overseas education consultancy with branches throughout Indonesia.

CV

Essay by Celina Lunsford Artistic
Director of Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany

View Anton Gautama’s website.

Statement
October All Over is the culmination of several years spent living in, working in, and documenting the Southern Oregon cannabis industry prior to legalization and during the time shortly after. I began this series in 2014 and stopped in the fall of 2017. I started with no motive or intention that was specific to photography. In the way I prefer to work, I was just there and had a camera that could fit in my pocket. I certainly wasn’t given an assignment. 

Sometime late in 2015 or early 2016, the realization that things wouldn’t remain as they were started to sink in. The industry was rapidly changing and continuing to operate in a dubious legal manner was becoming more difficult than it was even prior to legalization. Around this same time, the idea that capturing this may serve as some kind of “first person” historical account began to develop. I realized that this was the end of an era and the beginning of something much different. 

Up until that point, any concept or idea of a project, if there could be one, was always rather open ended: “people living and working in this crazy underground industry from the perspective of someone also embedded in it”. Since I was doing the work and living a similar life as everyone else, it just made sense. Some part of me still wanted to portray a narrative that remained personal, while also making clear that this was in one sense a dying industry; or at least one that had for better or worse shed its chrysalis and emerged as something very different. -KS

Bio
Kyle Souder is a Portland, Oregon based photographer. From 2009-2014 Kyle played bass in math-rock band Duck. Little Brother, Duck! During this time, he toured the US and Japan. It was through these frequent travels, often finding himself on the other side of the camera, that his infatuation with the alchemy of candid photography was rekindled. Kyle prefers to work in the vein of documentary and candid based photography. He is deeply infatuated by the pursuit of serendipitous moments, often finding the camera more capable than his philosophy education in helping to make sense of our shared reality. Kyle recently was awarded a scholarship to attend the CENTER’s 2019 Santa Fe Review.

Kyle is currently working on a book that is an extension of his series October All Over.

CV

Publication 

“Photographers: Color” Eyeshot, September 2019 

Freeman, Jesse “Jesse’s Visual Interviews: Kyle Souder” Japan Camera Hunter, April, 2019 

ACCCG Press, “ANTIBody Vol. 1” ACCCG Collective Publication, May 2019 

Awards and Recognition 

Attended – CENTER Santa Fe Review 2019 

Short List – Athens Photo Festival 2019 

Statement
I AM: For the Love of Nature are nude self-portraits composed in the Western U.S. at age 64-65, exploring the solitude and contemplative environment of the unoccupied landscape. Being in the natural environment provided solace for me during and after childhood difficulties. The landscape became a logical setting to explore personal and universal themes often associated with women — consumerism, sexualizing the female form, and judgments regarding the appearance of women in society. The images are performance pieces where my unclothed body, my gestures, and the surrounding natural elements, prompt questions about the meaning of vulnerability, nakedness, self-acceptance, and aging.

The images invite the viewer to accompany the artist in the less obvious adventures being presented, to experience the freedom, privacy, restfulness, and self-assertion conveyed in the photographs. The images declare: I will not become invisible with age and I am content being alone. Poetry created for each image explores these ideas further.

The subject is present and often standing, bearing witness to the places and memories of the journey that led her there. In others, the subject is reclining, finally finding a state of rest and comfort from a life of struggles, while hiding behind norms and protocols. The character is vulnerable, yet the scenes and accompanying words contrast the idea of fragility and exposure with empowerment – much like nature itself. The images aim to present the beauty of living natural things, in contrast to the desecration of both women and the environment.

The ideas of waste, trash, trash talk, merchandizing, old and useless often apply to women’s bodies and the environment. Rather than overt finger pointing in acid tones, the artist uses her own nakedness in nature to find beauty. She prefers honey rather than vinegar. Her image titles give clues; her accompanying poems invite the viewer to go deeper with her, into self-acceptance and respect for nature. – RD

Bio
I am an emerging artist living in Santa Fe, NM. I work in various media, including photography, ink drawing, painting, and conceptual installations. Words are important to me, so they often play a role in my art.

I like being naked in nature — it feels like a default state to me. I am also a private and at times formal person, which, I know, sounds like a contradiction. And so continues my transformation from being the dutiful daughter to an older woman more interested in free expression and self-acceptance. I’m more honey than vinegar, more focused on creating beauty than proselytizing.

I’ve been fortunate to work in many diverse professions — all of which feed into my creativity as an artist, now in my 60s.
-RD

Website

Statement
This series has been made over three years, while I was visiting home, South Korea, for summer and winter break. My grandmother was attending to the care of my grandfather who suffered from dementia. They were married for sixty years, each other’s lifetime companions, and then my grandmother became the caregiver whose work was unrelenting. These photographs reflect their bond, but also my grandmother’s struggle and fatigue. Their world was centered at home because my grandfather often gets out of control when he is outside of the house. My work continued after my grandfather’s death observing my grandmother’s new experience being alone. Photographing in such a limited environment has made me pay close attention to subtleties of gesture and the meaning for spatial relationships between them. – Sora Woo

Bio
Sora Woo (b.1991) is a visual artist andphotographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her works concentrate on observing the spatial relationship between humans and place. Woo is interested in discovering the threads of human interaction and what occurs after the absence of a person. Woo’s photographs capture a moment in the slow process of the passage of time. She not only depicts the passing of time, but also points out the physical and spiritual aspects of the “Irreversible”. Sora received her MFA from Pratt Institute, New York in 2018 and BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 2015.

Website

Statement
My Father, The Cowboy Actor

On December 19th, my Father made a surprise visit to my apartment in New York City. He got in late the night before from Flagstaff, Arizona and stayed the night at an old friend’s apartment in the Upper West Side. When he called me, I wasn’t sure what to expect or what to say since I hadn’t seen him in several years. When he came to my apartment, I made a portrait of him, and subsequently followed him around while he showed me what stood in place of his favorite bars, restaurants, and stores he used to peruse when he lived in New York City. After a week of being with my Father again, I realized I had to follow him back to his cabin in rural Arizona to photograph him and live with my Father for the first time.

For the first twenty-three years of my life, I never had a stable nor strong relationship with my Father. He was a distant member of our family that paid for our expenses, demanded time to see us on the weekend but was pushed away due to family dynamics and my preferred affiliation for my Mother. His career as an actor in New York City lasted twenty-five years, and upon the release of his children to higher education in places far from our hometown, he promptly left to become a cowboy just outside Flagstaff, Arizona. It’s only now that I’m beginning to comprehend the broken connection I have with my Father that I never cared to fix or understand. The man, my Father, Charles Glaser, is an enigmatic character and I attempt to comprehend his being and our relationship through Photography and Dialogue. By revisiting Charles’s old letters, documents and living with my Father in the desert, I attempt to trace my Father’s psychological journey while photographing his current self and the high desert that surrounds him.

Bio
William Glaser received his BFA in Photography from The Savannah College of Art & Design and travels extensively across the United States. William’s photographs celebrate regional- specific individuals and objects while exploring possible narratives.

Website

Statement
Gaspé Peninsula, an isolated and remote piece of land in Quebec, Canada, is a striking, poetic landscape, with luminous skies and an undisturbed silence, particularly in the winter.  Gaspé is a Micmac word for « land’s end ». This peninsula is the outermost advance into the sea of Quebec’s mainland territory; it is what Brittany’s Finistère —« finis terrae »— is to France, what Cornwall —with its own Land’s End—is to Britain, or Spain’s Cape Finisterre is to the European continent. The Gaspé is thus the New World’s End, mirroring the Old World’s End.

At this end of the world, a precarious way of life was fashioned, dependent on the sea. These photographs dwell on the traces of that life to be found in the dead of winter, when the land seems to hibernate. I made seven trips over three winters, and photographed the objects that are a representation of the essential links created between the people of the Gaspé and their land. The Edge of Time is a metaphor, a remote truth in a larger landscape that draws me to the transformative quality of snow on this rugged coastline and to the preciousness of a place that is isolated, therefore relatively untouched my the footprints of tourism. Here, where the cornerstones of Gaspé culture reveal themselves through the lens of my camera, my work becomes a reflection of the elemental, autonomous and unpredictable nature of history. – LR

Bio
Linda Rutenberg has worked as a fine art photographer for over 30 years. She has a BFA in film and music and an MFA in Photography from Concordia University in Montreal Quebec. She teaches, lectures and creates photographic series which evolve into books and exhibitions. She has published over fifteen publications.

In addition to her artistic work, she has owned and run a darkroom rental facility and a photography gallery. Currently Linda teaches and  lectures young artists mentoring them to bridge the gap between art and business.

Her fine art work has been exhibited internationally. Her series Urban Visions, One Island – Many Cities, Mont Royal, The Spiritual Landscape and The Garden at Night, After Midnight and The English Garden at Night  and her latest work The Gaspé Peninsula are all explorations of the relationship between the environment and its people. She is currently immersed in her new work The Negev Chronicles.

The Artist: Linda Rutenberg
For the last thirty years, my life and my career have been intimately connected because of photography. I began as an amateur, but realized very quickly that using a camera to explore the world was a wonderful way to express myself. I had my first camera at thirteen and over the next decades, completed a BA and Master’s degree in photography. I opened a photographic darkroom rental facility and then a fine art photography gallery. In addition, I lectured and taught workshops. Each of these experiences gave me new tools and perspectives on photography as both a career and as an art.

I have always been project-oriented. I generally spent three to four years photographing and refining a topic before moving on to the next. This rhythm began in 1998 with a yearlong study of Mount-Royal Park. Every week, I would leave my studio, which was close to the mountain, and photographed Montreal’s oasis in the center of the city. Subsequently I was introduced to Les Amis de la montagne in order to propose the idea of my first book and exhibition, which was published in 2000.

Then I changed direction with the purchase of my first digital camera in 2005, which I used specifically to explore the city at night, a topic that had always interested me. Until then, I had always worked in black and white, instead I decided to try color and investigate the night which was quickly disappearing from most cities, due to over-lighting.

A call from the magazine Landscape Architect sent me up to The Reford Gardens, which are located at the entrance to the Gaspé Peninsula north west of Montreal and Quebec City. Each summer they have an important garden festival.  The director, Alexander Reford, suggested that I photograph early in the morning and offered me the key to the front gate.  Instead, I proposed to him that my husband and I park our Westfalia camper inside the parking lot of the locked garden. He agreed and I suddenly realized that I was going to be spending the night in the garden and that it was a different quality of night from the city. My husband and I had a great time photographing with flashlights and we were unaware that this special evening would lead to a five-year project working after midnight in major public botanical gardens all over the US, Canada and England.

After my first visit to Metis, we returned many times to the region and visited in spring, summer and fall. I fell in love with the Gaspé Peninsula and became curious about what the winter was like. Everyone discouraged me from coming. They said it was cold and windy and that there was nothing to do. Yet, each protest made me more interested. It was after only one visit to Kamouraska in the winter where I witnessed the complete melting of the river overnight that I became completely transfixed by the possibilities of what winter held.

It took me one more year to find the time to come up to the Gaspé peninsula for an extended period of time to photograph. But after that first visit I was hooked. Each time I have returned, I have found it more compelling, filled with luminous light, wonderful welcoming people whose fascinating history has created a uniquely preserved culture.

This is the basis of my excitement and passion for this project, to reveal the special qualities of a place at a time when few have visited. – LR

Website

Artist Statements
My first trip to Southeast Asia in April 2018 found me attracted to the symbiotic life and culture of the rivers, lakes, and ocean bays of Vietnam and Cambodia. I have been rendering these captures  mostly as references or sketches to create dreamy, evocative spaces and places that transform the viewers sense of location and reality. Anonymity and references to painting are important to the mood I am attempting to convey. The alterations and enhancements, the manipulations of color and form add to the emotional response I am seeking from the viewer. There is often no consideration to reveal the content as it was.

This approach has carried over to a body of evolving work “Murder,” a yearly annoying  invasion of crows in the town where I live, into an artistic, whimsical body of work. (A flock of crows is referred to as a “murder.” )

With my discovery of Instagram a year ago,   I have been excited to dig deeper into the art/photo universe and I gratefully receive inspiration on a daily basis from other artists who excite me. My Instagram presence features many of the subjects I love.

Bio
Lawrence Manning’s personal and professional goals and life changed when he served as a Peace Corps English teacher and independent educational media consultant in Africa from 1969 through 1976. Not only did his entire global view and perception shift, but he passionately  fell in love with taking pictures.

In 1976 he returned to the United States and was fortunate to be hired as a staff photographer at a fortune 500 company. He learned a great deal of his craft and knowledge while on the job making technical images as well as working with portraiture and journalistic news within the company.

By 1983 he opened his own freelance business and became intensely involved and  invested in the early days of stock photography while pursuing commercial work.  This business eventually evolved into Hill Street Studios, a full time commercial media production studio.

In 2004, HSS with 21 other major producers of stock imagery formed Blend Images, the first stock agency dedicated to producing ethnic business and lifestyle imagery. His commercial and stock   images have appeared virtually everywhere in the world from small marketing campaigns to large scale advertising campaigns.

By 2016, the photography world had changed. With the evolution of the internet, the ubiquity of everyone being a photographer, and the saturation of stock photography, business declined and  he began to seek projects that would challenge his creative needs, to give himself assignments and challenges,  and  commit his time and passion to creating a new more individualistic artistic style.

In the past two years he has seriously been experimenting, altering, and enhancing his images in post production and the production of art prints. His art often is an enhancement of what might be termed “street photography” to more dreamlike impressions with a painterly look.

Instagram

Website

 

The Deconstructed Self

This series was inspired by a decision to move from my lifelong home in Kentucky to Santa Fe, New Mexico. The impetus for the move was unplanned and occurred at a time when I was also dealing with the decision to leave behind my professional identity as a psychotherapist.  The bright light and deep shadows of the Southwest immediately drew me in and I began to explore the urban landscape with my camera.

My photographs are a study of color fields, geometric shapes, negative space and light. My long-time work as a psychotherapist and love of abstract painting has influenced my work; I am using the symbols and spaces of the Southwest to reveal psychological metaphors – closed and open doors, shadows, and swimming pools are some of the subjects that draw me in.  These images are shot in a banal suburban landscape; I am interested in the places that others pass by, and I want to draw attention to the drama that others overlook. My images emphasize what is happening within the frame, yet they also ask the viewer to contemplate what exists just beyond the edges and cannot be known.

For me, these symbols and spaces touch on a part of the self that exists in the unconscious mind – reminding us that there is always something just below the surface of awareness threatening to reveal something new.

Bio

Natalie Christensen is a photographer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico and is a frequent contributor to online contemporary and fine art photography magazines, has won several regional awards, and shown work in the U.S. and internationally including London, Dusseldorf, New York and Los Angeles. She is one of five invited photographers for the exhibition The National 2018: Best of Contemporary Photography at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art and has recently been named one of “Ten Photographers to Watch” by the Los Angeles Center of Digital Art.  In addition to pursuing her interests in art and design, Natalie worked as a psychotherapist for over 25 years and has been particularly influenced by the work of depth psychologist, Carl Jung. This influence is evidenced in her photographs, as shadows and psychological metaphors are favored subjects.

The “Tree Talk On-Line Exhibition” features photographs by 47 photographers on view in our Virtual Gallery located on the Griffin’s website. The photographers are: Jan Arrigo, Zia Ayub, Gary Beeber, Sheri Lynn Behr, Theo Carol, Richard Alan Cohen, Lisa Cohen, Dawn Colsia, Sandi Daniel, Adrienne Defendi, Melissa Eder, Deena Feinberg, Michele Fletcher, Nancy Fulton, Erik Gehring, Lauren Grabelle, Arthur Griffin, Emily Hamilton Laux, David Hebden, Tracy Hoffman, Timothy Hyde, Cathy Immordino, Lee Kilpatrick, Barbara Kyne, Scott Lerman, Erica Martin, Alysia Macaulay, Yvette Meltzer, Larry Merrill, Robert Moran, Jan Nagle, Eleanor Owen Kerr, Roseanna Prevost, Becky Ramontowski, Robin Repp, Suzanne Révy, Albert Rodrigo, Susan Rosenberg Jones, Don Russell, Joshua Sarinana, Sara Silks, JP Terlizzi, Stephen Tomasko, Donna Tramontozzi, Julie Williams-Krishnan, Yelena Zhavoronkova, Mike Zeis, and Charlyn Zlotnik