August 21 – September 28, 2025
Reception for the artists – Saturday August 23, 4 to 6pm
Online Artist Talk – Jennifer McClure section – September 10, 6.30 – 8.30pm
Online Artist Talk – Emily Belz section – September 11, 6.30 – 8.30pm
We are pleased to present the portfolios of the Photography Atelier 39 creative artists.
Photography Atelier is a portfolio and project-building course for emerging to advanced photographers taught by Emily Belz and Jennifer McClure.
Participants engage in supportive critical discussions of each other’s work and leave with a better understanding of the industry and the ability to edit and sequence their own work.
Instruction in the Atelier includes visual presentations based around an assignment which is designed to encourage experimentation in both subject matter and approach. Students learn the basics of how to approach industry professionals to show their work and how to prepare for a national or regional portfolio review. There is discussion of marketing materials, do-it-yourself websites, DIY book publishing and the importance of social media. Students learn the critical art of writing an artist’s statement and bio.
The students here were part of our year long portfolio development program from Fall of 2025 to Spring 2025 and we are thrilled to see their work in the main gallery at Winchester.
Students of Emily Belz:
Julie Berson | Jaina Cipriano | Janet Smith | Megan Riley | L. Jorj Lark | Donna Gordon | Craig Childs | William Feiring | Jennifer Erbe | Paul Baskett
Students of Jennifer McClure:
Margaret Rizzulto | Judy Katz | Francine Sherman | Georgia McGuire | Linda Bryan | Shawn Ewald | Julia Buteux | Benita Mayo | Irene Matteucci
Students of Emily Belz:
Paul Baskett: Uncertain Designs
Tension–between truth and fiction, clarity and opacity, assurance and uncertainty–drives my image-making. I believe questions fuel creativity, and my work embraces ambiguity as a space for exploration rather than resolution.
Uncertain Designs consists of a series of discrete images conceived as disconnected tableaux, stage sets seen just after the curtain rises and lights go up, but before actors appear or speak. In this hushed, liminal space anticipation builds, questions flourish, and narratives, still undefined, can go anywhere. These images combine multiple photographic and discrete AI-generated elements, digitally collaged and manipulated as guided by intuition, to create layered, open-ended narratives that resist fixed meaning, challenge certainty, and encourage curiosity. There are no answers here; I am, after all, only the stagehand. You are the director, the playwright. Take these sets where you will.
As we all increasingly are bombarded by lies masquerading as truths, as authoritarian authors disparage inquiry and promote absurdities as wisdom, our ability, willingness to question, to create unbounded by dogma, is more important than ever. By blending the “real” with the constructed, I invite viewers, both here and most especially once outside the gallery, to question, to engage with the unknown, to embrace uncertainty, and to find meaning not as delivered but on their own terms.
Julie Berson: Women Speak on the Election
Women’s rights were central to the 2024 election. As a woman I turned to art as a way to connect with other women in particular, across the entire political spectrum. I wanted to understand what they were thinking and feeling in these polarized times.
I worked in two media – photography and the written word – both photographing and interviewing each woman. I wanted their words to convey their thoughts and feelings, and the intimacy of the photographic portraits to reveal what words could not. No woman is identified with any specific quote, in order to dispel stereotypes. My own preconceptions were quickly shattered as I heard the layered and sometimes surprisingly unstereotypical ideas and thoughts that were shared with me.
The intention of this project is to bear witness to the common humanity of women from every political perspective. To offer the hope that we can reach for each with both empathy and accountability, even in the most extreme environment. In doing this work I learned that a deeper connection and understanding is possible for me and that every woman I spoke to was thirsting for the same thing, despite our differences.
Perhaps by having one conversation at a time, one connection at a time, “bird by bird”, we can be healed.
Craig Childs: Hardwick: Preservation of a Way of Life
Moving from rural Texas to Boston in the summer of 2020 I was searching for a link to home, having been away from city life for over 20 years. I found it at alocal outdoor farmer’s market, leading to friendships with several of the farmers from the village of Hardwick, Massachusetts.
Hardwick, a township in central Massachusetts was established in 1739 and consists predominantly of the village of Hardwick, and Gilbertville, which began as a mill town in the 1860s. At first, the visitor sees a New England common of colonial era homes, buildings and churches, begging to be on a Christmas card. The surrounding small family farms, pastures, and greenhouses stand in contrast to the larger scale industrial farms of the Midwest. The village of Gilbertville, with its depression era mills, evoke memories of long departed New England textile manufacturing.
Hardwick has become dear to this Texan’s heart. It’s a place where the residents tell the stories of local villagers who founded the town in the aftermath of King Philip’s War that opened central Massachusetts to European settlement. Stories of those who fought in the “French War”, of those who were the patriots and who were the Tories at the outbreak of the “Rev War”-all of which inform the conversations after a day of planting, or harvesting, or rebuilding a rock wall or repairing a tractor. Shay’s rebellion is discussed with respect. A place where the local farmers sell their produce in farmer’s markets, preserving a way of life inherited from colonial days.
This ongoing photo project begins with what it means to love where you live and what you do. Yet, along side the resilience of the farmers, Gilbertville struggles yet with the poverty, crime, and joblessness left behind by the departure of manufacturing. Understanding this community requires an appreciation of these tensions, without which the narrative of the small farming community would be incomplete.
Jaina Cipriano: The Lucky Ones
At 17 time stops. You have forever briefly in your grasp. You remember, don’t you? Any thing was possible and nothing mattered. The future is a beautiful dream, never approaching.
Trouble has no meaning and boundaries are meant to be pushed. To learn when to stop, you have to go too far. And you are a lucky one if you don’t write your future on an unfortunate incident.
This time in my life has been deeply etched in my memory and I can’t let it go. It haunts me. And I think I somehow always knew it would. The photographs are visual journals, I kept a meticulous record of this time. It was the only way to cope with the change I knew was coming.
These photographs are the last of time before the internet became a place. We wandered aimless as kids. Our flip phones, always dying and being charged on the go, gave us a way to connect- “where u at?” and that was it. Life was outside the phone.
Now phones are an extension of ourselves. When the phone and the camera fused with smartphones photographs stopped being memories and started becoming content. Our photos weren’t personal documents anymore, they were public.
When the camera turns on people now there is a new awareness-where will that photo go? Who will see it? And what will they think of me?
I see a freedom in these images that is of that age, yes, but that is also of the time. We were living on the cusp of change, the very last of a free world.
Jennifer Erbe: Dislocation
I was raised as an only child by adoptive parents who loved me dearly, but never really understood me. I never fit the way my mother wanted me to be. I was a curious kid who spent a lot of time by myself. I loved to explore outside, finding clay and picking wild strawberries. My hair was tangled, and invariably I had dirt on my knees, despite the smocked dresses and patent leather shoes she favored for me.
The photographs in this project document spaces in the middle–between two worlds. Trails that wind along the Charles River and back onto commercial neighborhoods. City parks and urban residences. They contain unseen characters and stories. These places ask questions of me when I’m walking: Are these stories about the family I grew up with, or the one I never knew? Am I making narratives? Self-portraits?
These in-between spaces feel familiar. They inhabit two opposing identities–natural beauty and practicality, industrial spaces and beautiful light, nature and concrete. The odd character of these spaces reminds me that being a little off is okay. Often there is a human presence in an unexpected place, or a portal that calls me to come and explore. Usually, though, the portals only expose more questions. Questions about myself, little hints of who I am–but no answers.
William Feiring: Feel The Music
The power of music is universal.
Most of us have songs we love. Music can remind us of people, places or experiences that hold meaning for us, as well as evoke feelings of joy, excitement, or sadness. When I Listen to “Mother’s Song” by Gregory Porter, I always think of my mom and how important she was to me in my life.
For this project, I asked people to listen to music that holds meaning for them while being photographed. I wanted to capture their emotions to the music. Some of the songs chosen I new, and during the sitting, I often found myself absorbed by the melody or lyrics and forgetting I was supposed to be taking a photo.
Just like the many genres of music, many kinds of feelings were evoked, from sorrow to happiness. Some were meditative as they listened, others more physically expressive. Before a session, many people voiced that they were apprehensive about being photographed, however the power of the music moved everyone beyond self-consciousness. Four days after sitting, Brown, ninety-four, old me “Been a long time since I’ve taken the time to enjoy those musical pleasures.” Eight days later Brown passed away.
Donna Gordon: In the Garden
There’s a certain exchange that takes place between the figure and the landscape. Ideas of blooming and decay, growth and awakening—all synonymous with human change and birth and aging.
Perhaps the ultimate pairing in idea and image is a human portrait with a backdrop of Nature. This series of portraits of women works to dispel the widespread stereotype of Eve in the Garden of Eden.
My portraits make visible contemporary women of many ages and backgrounds—showing their strength, diversity, imagination and vulnerability.
Each woman—in a nod to Eve—is accompanied by a garden element—whether set in a field, farm, grotto, yard, public park or indoor setting.
Photography witnesses that fraction of a second in which we live and breathe, the instant before moving on and morphing into something different. Portrait photography in particular brings me face to face with a unique being—whose thoughts I think I contain for a fleeting second—before letting go.
I. Jorj Lark: Urban Stutter
Initially there were moments of reflection. I’d pick up in my camera to capture reflections upon glass or shiny surfaces, or water. Puddles, seas, raindrops. Did you know that the whole world lives upside down in a dew drop. Do you know how many dewdrops there are in the grass in the early morning? In these reflections, the cityscape was inverted, curved, managed into a multiplicity of itself. This became my notion of urban stutter. That the street environment has multiple, moving, variable points of view at any given instant. Dynamic. Irrepressible experiences that are multifaceted, fractured, refracted, reflected, repeated over and over until the myriad voices strung together create a new meaningful whole.
The scent of wet cement, for example, and textures, and sounds, a vital gust of wind, evolved my definition and moments to capture as reflected environment. Also the notion of nature inserting herself in countless ways. And lately, as I live in wonder at the cacophony and quietude of macro to micro, it dawns on me how very many decisions have been made by individuals to concoct these environs. Stunning.
As a street photographer, primarily, I’m moving from literal to abstract visual moments as I’m documenting “exactly” what i see. One spot can bring about impressionism, surrealism, any fine art painterly modality, all inspire me. My photography is bold. Bold colors, shapes and I give a moment for things that inhabit the sidelines or act as backgrounds in our lives to inhabit the center, to be considered elegant and sublime and meaningful.
I feel like I’m stalking beauty. That the world itself, all of it, each singular component is ineffable, remarkable, a profound miracle of existence. The edges of texture, scent, the thunder of a working construction site all substantial, amorphous and impermanent. I wonder who made you? For what? And why are you so beautiful? Or ugly beautiful? I share these images with you in the hopes that you will see it too. On my very worst days, I remind myself that I get to see in color. Here for you are some of my best days.
Megan Riley: Self, Preserved
As I march firmly into my sixties, I can’t help but notice (and yes, participate in) the absurd lengths women–in life and on social media–go to in an attempt to stop the unstoppable, aging. We are bombarded with a staggering variety of creams, potions, procedures and exercises designed to keep us young. The results are often hilariously cringe-worthy. More horrifying than if we did nothing at all. Beneath all this lies society‘s demand for youth and perfection, and to erase the physical manifestations of a life lived. Our worth tied to how well we preserve the physical version of ourselves that once was.
Self, Preserved is about the desire to resist time and the folly in trying to control what is meant to change. Using metaphor and humor, I explore this concept by sealing physical representations of women’s body parts (including my own) in plastic. These plastic encased objects become distorted and unnatural, just like we become the harder we try to stop the natural process of aging. The irony being that the more we attempt to preserve the bits of ourselves, the more disconnected we become from our whole, authentic self.
Janet Smith: Unexpected Beauty
Three dead hosta leaves in my driveway marked the beginnings of this project. They were pretty, all curled and graceful so I saved them. In walks around the neighborhood, I found more leaves that had let go of their anchors and so began what has become a multi-year still life project.
My leaf collection grew to include other types of plants and new discoveries were everywhere: on walks in the woods, in fields, by ponds, at the edges of parking lots and wherever wild things grew. As I walked through the seasons, I selected new subjects based on their delicate and graceful shapes, interesting textures, and patterns of their branches.
During this time, I also photographed the changing light on the landscapes around me and used these photos as backdrops for my still life arrangement. This process transformed simple photos of botanical forms into quiet moments where a still life and a landscape dissolved into one another.
The plants preserved in my photographs make me marvel at finding beauty in nature where we least expect it. They are memories from seasons past and invite pause, stillness and reflection on nature and the passing of time. When I complete this project, I will say goodbye to my collections and return them to nature.
Students of Jennifer McClure:
Linda Bryan: Falling Leaves: Mother and Daughters
Dear Mom you said you wouldn’t hit anymore love, _____. (sister)
I recently found these words, scrawled in a child’s hand on pink origami paper, buried in a box of old report cards and other family ephemera. The message sent my mind reeling—its words didn’t align with how I remembered my mother when we were children.
Decades after my sister wrote that note, as I sift through keepsakes saved by my mother and grandmother, I am uncovering more questions than answers. I once believed our family tree was strong and historic; now, I see it as fragile, slightly twisted, and missing limbs—much like my childhood memories.
Within these boxes are old sepia photographs—faces of distant relatives, strangers without names or context—along with contemporary images, some bearing the weight of time, their colors fading, surfaces cracked or water-damaged. They are physical reminders of how Memory fades, distorts, or vanishes entirely.
In one old, damaged, and out-of-focus photograph, I am sitting in a light-green Victorian chair in my grandparents’ living room. It bothers me that I can’t pull the image of the person who took the picture from my memory, nor recall the day the photo was taken. Has the photograph replaced the memory?
When I ask my sisters about past events or old photographs, our recollections often differ widely. Which memories are real? Have the stories I’ve clung to—the ones that once defined my sense of self and family—been misinterpretations all along? Despite these uncertainties, I feel an urgent need to reconnect, to piece together the faces and events, even if it shatters what I once considered true.
Falling Leaves is a project with many branches. By combining personal andvintage family images and objects, I create a visual dialogue on memory—both real and imagined—exploring the intricate ties between family, place,and identity. Each piece derived from my ever-shrinking branch of a largerfamily tree—one that, like memory itself, continues to shift and transform.
Julia Burteux: This Too Shall Pass
Imagine my surprise when I discovered emotions are not thoughts but physical sensations-chemical responses released in the brain. For years, I carried stories of joy, injustice, shame, and frustration, believing them to be my emotions. In reality, those stories were simply thoughts I had attached to fleeting feelings.
Science has shown that, with the exception of grief, emotions pass through the body in just ninety seconds-just a minute and a half. Yet, instead of allowing emotions to move through me by simply naming them and letting them go, I held onto them, replaying narratives that kept them alive far longer than necessary.
This realization has profoundly shaped my artistic practice. Through my work, This Too Shall Pass, I explore the transient nature of emotion and the tension between momentary feeling and prolonged thought. Using images applied to mirrors, I create pieces that serve as meditations on what it means to experience, release, and transform emotional energy. / broke the plate and this feeling is embarrassment. My things were stolen and this feeling is anger. My mother is sick and this feeling is sadness. The mirror reflects the viewer back to themselves, making them an active participant in the work.
An accompanying clock further reinforces this concept, offering an immersive experience of the ninety-second arc in which emotions naturally rise and fall. This added element encourages visitors to confront their own emotional attachments and consider how they engage with their feelings-whether they let them pass or prolong them through thought.
By embracing this perspective, my work becomes a visual and temporal representation of emotion’s impermanence. It encourages self-reflection, awareness, and perhaps even liberation from the stories we tell ourselves.
Stacey Ewald: The Allure of Darkness
From childhood, we are taught to fear the dark, a primal instinct reinforced by ghost stories and the unknown. However, I have always found myself drawn to its enigmatic embrace. I am captivated by the ‘dark side’ in art, literature, and film. Even now, amidst the often difficult realities reflected in news and media, I remain pulled toward its undeniable power. Darkness is not just a landscape of danger and uncertainty, but a place of silence and contemplation, of romance and intimacy, and of unexpected beauty where the familiar fades and the unexpected blooms. It is where our instinctive fear of the unknown clashes with a deeper curiosity. We are wired to seek clarity and predictability, yet darkness offers something else: a fertile space for imagination and emotional depth.
My work explores the lyrical power of darkness not to obscure it but to transform. The images are reimagined through shadow and absence. Within this darkness, perception slows, allowing for a closer look and a new kind of engagement, one that reveals hidden truths, sparks mystery, and offers the possibility of finding unexpected warmth in its resonant atmosphere. This is an invitation to embrace the allure of darkness, to challenge the ingrained fear and to discover what lies within the velvety rich shadows.
Judy Katz: What Lies Ahead…
I ceased making photos for many years. Familial and professional obligations were front and center. As we say (and so often as a woman) – “life got in the way”. Off and on for years, reengaging with photography was on my list of things to do. I could say that I finally had an epiphany, but it was more a simple recognition that I was at a point in life where planning for the future might come with limitations. I could either focus on regrets or check off items on my list. I decided to act. I retraced my steps, poring over an archive of images I had made over the years. Several recurring themes were evident. Light and shadows, often connected to paths and portals that sometimes led to clear destinations and other times were murky in terms of the endpoint. Hints of both movement and stillness simultaneously.
As part of my “re-entry routine”, I developed a routine of local photowalks. I found that I am still drawn to exploring passageways, noting the light and patterns that seem to beckon me. Personal circumstances have limited my travel, but not the possibility of capturing gateways and openings, both obvious and obscure, that might lead anywhere. When we are young, possibilities seem endless. As we age, we may either dwell on the past or focus on the future.
This project focuses on paths and portals that leave us free to choose the endpoint. In my mind, they lead to a past in which I visit with family and friends who are no longer with me, to a future centered on the growth and blossoming of grandchildren, or even to my own continuing evolution. These photos may not pull us “through the looking glass” into a fantasy world, but we can still be challenged to decide where these paths will take us.
Benita Mayo: Blueprint
Memory is unreliable, and time has a way of bending the truth. I have always been on ajourney to unearth and examine the stories that live within me—some through my own experience, but most through inheritance.
When Daddy suddenly passed in 2020, the tectonic plates of my life forever shifted. In an instant, I knew life would never be the same. As I find myself longing to understand the past, the impermanence of memory is palpable. I feel as if I’m racing toward an invisible finish line.
My parents were born in Virginia, a state with an indelible imprint on America’s most painful and pivotal chapters: the rise of slavery, the Civil War, and the long struggle for civil rights.Over 350,000 men, women, and children were sold from Richmond’s auction block. Virginia was the capital of the Confederacy, and the Fall of Richmond marked the end of the CivilWar. Later, during a time of “massive resistance,” a neighboring county chose to close its public schools rather than integrate them. This was the Virginia into which my father was born.
History and politics shaped my family’s story. They directly influenced how we were raised.The most pervasive feelings I remember from childhood were fear and loneliness. We lived with trauma, sorrow, silence, and deep wounding. But at the heart of it all, there was love—and a steadfast hope that tomorrow could be better than today.
Toni Morrison, in The Bluest Eye, urges us not to “forgive and forget,” but to “remember and do better.” Too often, shame and embarrassment silence truth. But only through declaration and revelation can truth and insight rise. Only then can the cracks begin to mend, and healing begin.
Much of what I have struggled with throughout my life has roots in collective trauma. In mysearch to understand what happened to me, I’ve spent 1,571 hours in therapy. It has takendecades to identify the cycles, to stop the bleeding, to clean the wound, and to begin thework of healing. For any wound to heal, this must come first. Then, in time, new tissueforms—a foundation for new skin that is stronger, more resilient.
Through words and pictures, I recount the fierce determination of a man caught in the web of history. The deck was stacked against him. But he made a way out of no way. The calmness of the landscape conceals the quiet outrage, the mourning, and the sacred commemoration.
Irene Matteucci: Overlooked
I started this project as a way discover my new neighborhood. I looked for things that make the area
unique, an urban landscape discovering its artistic side, making an effort to show that it is growing. As I
progressed, however, it became less about the neighborhood and more about the moment. The images
became less descriptive and more abstract, using angles, light, shadow, depth, color, and reflections to
show the mystery in unexpected places.
There is a sense of not knowing in these images. But maybe I don’t need to know because what I’m
seeing is complete within itself. Photography shows the world in a way that can’t be seen with the naked
eye, frozen in time and space. Light changes from one second to the next. One fleeing moment exists
because I captured it, I noAced. My photographs hint at a larger story.
As I’m moving about my world, wherever I happen to be, I am drawn to the interesting corner, the
intriguing shape, how light illuminates, and how reflection redraws. I look from the inside out and the
outside in. I welcome the discovery of the overlooked, giving it a voice and the chance to be seen by a
new audience
Georgia McGuire: Graceful Moments
Graceful Moments is a collection of photographic images that celebrate the serene elegance of nature, inspired by my transformative trip to Japan. The country’s culture and art, particularly it’s simplicity, deeply influenced my approach to photography. In an isolated portrait-style, I often focus on Japanese objects – baskets, screens, and Japanese paper – capturing their harmony with nature. The use of intentional negative space and an unusual dip in composition, create a sense of stillness, balance, and quiet reflection. An abstract angle changes one’s perspective allowing a glimpse of the intrigue outside the space. This intimately private peek into my personal world creates a wonder of moments in time.
The project images are printed on a luminous vellum that compliments the hand gilded metal substrate creating a unique work of art. Each piece is then cold waxed and hand buffed to bring out the translucent beauty of the gold leaf.
The process of photographing, whether inside or outside, is deeply meditative for me, inviting mindfulness and an appreciation for the delicate importance of nature. It also draws parallels from transient beauty found in nature, much like the fleeting moments captured in Japanese Haiku poetry.
Moments
Graceful petals fall,
With stillness in the day’s air,
Time slips through my hands.
~ Georgia McGuire
Margaret Rizzuto: Dare Me
‘Invisibility Syndrome’ isn’t a metaphor—it’s a lived experience. As women age, we are dismissed, overlooked, and essentially invisible. It doesn’t seem to matter how brilliant, beautiful, or accomplished we’ve been—we vanish. No one is exempt. I know—because I’m living it. And I’ve come to realize I’m far from alone.
While this is a deep and often painful truth, I was determined that this project not feel hopeless. I want to illuminate it, to name it, and to push back—loudly. No—no, we do not have to accept this erasure. We will not accept it. Dare Me is a refusal. It’s also a reclamation.
It has taken us a lifetime to arrive at this place—through pain and joy, growth and hard-won wisdom—and we deserve not just to be seen, but, dare I say, celebrated.
To bring this evolution into visual form, I found an unlikely ally: Flo, a beautifully crafted, mature doll from Poland. She became my muse for this project, embodying the vulnerability, acceptance, and defiance of aging with grace. This work is for every woman who’s been made to feel small in the very years she’s
grown into her full power.
We’ve earned the right to be seen—fully, fiercely. The dare is ours to take.
Fran Sherman: My 70th Year
In my 70th year, I feel unmoored as I navigate life in retirement, without the urgency of family and work that was my reality for so many years. The open space is both unsettling and exciting.
In the chaos of raising a family and building a career, I found structure and purpose. Life was busy but also felt full and limitless. Now I have more time than ever each day, but I have fewer years ahead of me. Life is full of contradictions—I am grateful for all I have yet eager for more; energetic yet tired; creative yet stuck. Time is expansive and compressed, moving slowly and quickly at once.
Conversations with my peers confirm that they too are figuring out who they are and how to make the most of time as they age. We haven’t changed, but less is demanded of us at a time when we have so much to give.
My 70th Year is an ongoing photographic journal. Using a documentary photography approach, I make pictures of my daily life to better understand how I am feeling and where I am going. Still lives reflect parts of me, and long exposures, focus, collage, and images in series, show the way my life feels embedded in and experienced through the lens of time.
