Down Garden Paths

Elin Spring of “What Will You Remember” Review

Mark Feeney of The Boston Globe Review

Curator’s Statement

Video of Exhibition by Ivana Damien George

Working the Land – Craig J. Barber
Statement
There are still those who continue a close relationship with the land and all it has to offer:  hunters, farmers, woodsmen, gardeners, foragers.  I want to recognize and honor these individuals and their commitment, in a series of portraits in their working environments.

I have chosen to work with the tintype process for it’s feeling of timelessness and it’s aesthetic connection to an era when we were all closer to the land. – CJB

Bio
I am a photographer who travels and works using antiquarian processes and focuses on the cultural landscape.  During the past 20 years I have focused my camera on Viet Nam, Havana, and the Catskill region of New York State, documenting cultures in rapid transition and fading from memory.  My work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe and Latin America and is represented in several prominent museum and private collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Brooklyn Art Museum; the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY; and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina, among others.  I have received several grants including from the Seattle Arts Commission, the Polaroid Corporation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.  In 2006 Umbrage Editions published my book, “Ghosts in the Landscape:  Vietnam Revisited.”

I have been photographing for over 40 years and teaching for 25 of those years.  I have taught classes and workshops and Lectured throughout the United States, Europe and Latin America, at the International Center for Photography in New York, the Center for Photography in Woodstock, NY, Charles University in Prague, CZ, and others. – CJB

Website

Phantasmagorical – Joan Lobis Brown
Statement
Phantasmagorical is the title of my photo series in which I merged reflections from the exterior with the interior and created my own fantasyland.

I purposely crafted a world in which reality is overtaken by imagination. In my world, birds perch on coffee cups and fly free around my kitchen. Human beings, still central and recognizable in my fantasyland, take on new shapes and dimensions, sometimes friendly, sometimes menacing. The boundary between the objects in the home and the flora and fauna in the garden is blurred.  This is a world where magic emerges from the images, where it is a joy to observe, live and design.

As the project continued, I realized this is not simply whimsical and illusory; the photographs could also be viewed metaphorically. “Phantasmagorical” represents the dichotomy of what we as humans present to the world, and what we as individuals keep hidden internally– that which is our own unique true selves. It alludes to the split between what people are feeling on the inside and the mask people put on in their everyday lives. It symbolizes our collective public face and our secret realities. This is our human condition.

I took these images exactly as I saw them through my camera’s viewfinder. Each image represents the “rush” that I feel when capturing what I want to feel in the face of what actually exists. -JLB

Bio
Joan Lobis Brown is a portrait and landscape photographer who has been widely shown in group and solo exhibitions in the United States, Europe, Australia, the Middle East and Africa. She has three solo exhibitions scheduled for 2019. Since 2013, she has been selected for eighty-five international juried competitions. Her work has been published online and in print magazines such as The Huffington Post, Zeke, mic.com, Hyperallergic. com, The International Photo Review, Featureshoot, POZ and others.

Her portrait projects highlight segments of our society that have been subjected to intense stigma. Her landscape projects include subjects as diverse as global warming and creating a photographic world where reality is overtaken with imagination.

Brown studied photography in the Advanced Studies Program at The International Center of Photography.

She lives and works in New York City.

Website

J.W. Fike’s Photographic Survey of the Wild Edible Botanicals of the North American Continent
Jimmy Fike (In the Atelier Gallery)
Statement
Since 2008, I’ve been creating a photographic archive depicting America’s rich trove of wild edible flora. The project has taken me to fifteen different states, so far, and I’ve amassed a collection of over one hundred and forty specimens. The work sprung from disillusionment with the position of landscape photography in relation to pressing threats like climate change, extinction, pollution and the loss of commons. Too often, the genre traffics in the aesthetics of nature instead of the inner workings of ecology. To address climate change and environmental degradation, I felt a radically different artistic strategy was necessary. The resulting series; J.W. Fike’s Photographic Survey of the Wild Edible Botanicals of the North American Continent; Plates in Which the Edible Parts of the Specimen have been Illustrated in Color seemed a promising vein of work that satisfied the new critical criteria I set for landscape-based artwork – a socially engaged approach that was accessible without sacrificing theoretical depth and possessed the potential to affect change.

By employing a system that makes it easy to identify both the plant and its edible parts, the images function as reliable guides for foraging. This concrete, functional aspect of the project directs viewers to free food that can be used for sustenance, or as raw material for creative economies. The seemingly objective style of the images references early contact prints from the dawn of photography (Henry Fox Talbot, Anna Atkins) when photography’s verisimilitude proved a promising form of scientific illustration for taxonomical undertakings.

Beyond functionality, I try to construct images that operate on multiple levels theoretically and perceptually. Upon longer viewing the botanicals begin to transcend the initial appearance of scientific illustration – they writhe and pulsate trying to communicate with you about their edible parts while hovering over an infinite black expanse. This opticality becomes a physiological parallel to the chemical effects of ingesting the plants and opens up a mystical space for contemplation, communion and meditation. The scientific yields to something potentially spiritual as the viewer begins to experience our symbiotic evolution with the plant kingdom. I’ve been informed and inspired by Buddhist and Native American teachings about ecology, inter-connectivity, and consciousness. I found the Buddhist teaching on dependent origination particularly profound and elegant: “If this exists, that exists; if this ceases to exist, that also ceases to exist.” I often find myself marveling at the intricate web of overlapping systems and sheer length of time – incomprehensible fathoms of time – it took to develop this symbiosis.

To achieve this layered aesthetic the plant photographs are meticulously constructed. I photograph multiple specimens of the same plant and combine the best elements from each to create an archetypal rendering of the species. By judiciously rearranging, scaling, and warping I can vivify the plant and turn the ground into space. This subtle reference to shamanic scrying and other mystical forms of seeing nudges the work towards the numinous. I hope viewers carry this numinous experience back out into the landscape, into their communities and see the plants that surround them in a fresh, wonder-filled way. Or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson more eloquently described the phenomenon, “The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them.”

This work offers a dose of something palliative for the ills of alienation – a sense of connection to a certain place, a certain ecosystem, a type of belonging. With this in mind, I plan on continuing the survey until I’ve amassed an expansive enough cross-section of the botanical life on the continent to mount biome-specific exhibitions anywhere within the continental United States. After ten years of work, I’m excited to be approaching this goal. I hope the photographic survey can serve as a historical archive of botanical life during eras of extreme change, and provide viewers all over the country an opportunity to feel the type of bond with their landscapes that will encourage health, engender wonder, help identify free food, and most importantly, inspire greater concern for environmental issues. – JWF

Bio
Jimmy Fike was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1970. He earned a BA in Art from Auburn University and an MFA in Photography from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. He’s worked as an Art Professor at Wake Forest and Ohio Universities. Currently, he’s Residential Art Faculty and Exhibitions Coordinator at Estrella Mountain College in Avondale, Arizona. His photographic work endeavors to push the tradition of landscape photography into the realm of socially engaged practice. His series on wild edible plants has been exhibited extensively across the USA, featured in the LA times, the Washington Post and accepted into the permanent collection of the George Eastman House Museum. When not teaching or making art Jimmy enjoys hiking with his dogs Sallie and Scrappy Doo, cooking, listening to music and reading.

CV

Website

Sustain – Ivana Damien George
Statement
I am passionate about eating delicious food and living an environmentally sustainable lifestyle.  One of the ways I reduce my carbon footprint is by eating a predominately plant based diet and growing my own produce. I share my passions for sustainable living and food through my images in my series Sustain.

My husband and I grow fruits and vegetables in containers and a 4’ wide by 50’ raised beds at our small urban lot around our home.   We grow much more food than we can consume at the time of harvest, so we preserve it with canning, freezing and drying and eat it through the fall and winter.  Growing our own food eliminates the carbon emissions associated with the transit of produce. The vegetables we grow are much more delicious that what can be purchased at the local grocer because we can allow the fruits and vegetables to ripen on the plants.  We use non-toxic and organic growing methods.  This form of agriculture is beneficial for the pollinator insects and soil enhancing organisms.  Since there are no pesticides or waxes on the food, there is no need to peel vegetables, which increases the nutritional value of the food we eat.  The experience connecting with the earth through gardening is so calming, meditative and provides a deep sense of satisfaction.

My color images deliver a sense of immediacy and sensual expression of the food I grow. Backyard organic vegetable gardening is something that anyone can do right now to reduce your carbon footprint and increase your health by eating more fresh, nutritious organic produce. The color combined with my use lighting, framing and posing to creatively expresses the beauty, unique variety and deliciousness of the fruits and vegetables that can be grown in a small urban space.

To connect the themes in my project to the history of American vegetable gardening, especially the WWII era victory gardens, where Americans grew 60% of their produce during the war, I create prints with a vintage aesthetic.  I want to evoke a sense of nostalgia for a time when more people grew food in the backyard and community gardens.  I innovated a technique using mixed media and digital photography image transfer on aluminum to create these unique artworks in warm tones that recall the historic tintype process.  Subtle inclusions of the contemporary urban environment connect us from our past to our present and the artworks highlight a means to a more sustainable future. The artworks are protected with a glossy archival ultraviolet light blocking spray. Additionally, I use an analog 8″ x 10″ camera to record in exquisite detail the gorgeous textures of the fruits and vegetables. Baroque inspired lighting glistens off the dewdrops on the freshly harvested produce. – IDG

Bio
Ivana Damien George is an interdisciplinary artist working in photography, sound, video, and mixed media since 1998. The starting point in her art practice is a belief that great art not only is visually compelling but that it should also have a subject matter, a meaning, and an inspirational purpose beyond the purely aesthetic.  She believes in the power of art to inspire, inform and engage viewers in the critical issues of our time.  She is passionate about exploring the relationship between humanity and the natural world and motivated by a love of exploration and learning. She takes on various roles such as gardener, mountain climber, investigator, and environmental activist in order to explore the world. In her art she shares her discoveries, insights and observations. As an artist who uses lens-based imaging, her aesthetic is one of carefully constructing an image rather than taking a picture.  She manipulates the media to construct a metaphor, idea or expression in her work.

She has exhibited her work in over 50 national juried and invitational exhibitions including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Flash Forward Photography Festival, The Griffin Museum, Panopticon Gallery, Newspace Center for Photography, CAC in Las Vegas, Soho Photo Gallery, Dallas Video Festival, Junction Arts Festival and the Danforth Museum. She has completed an artist in residency fellowship at the Vermont Studio Residency Center. Since 2002, she has been the recipient of numerous grants for the creation of artworks. Her work has been written about in the Boston Globe, Orion Magazine, the Las Vegas Sun, Atlanta’s Creative Loafing as well as several blogs.  She holds a M.F.A. degree from the joint program of The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University. She is an Associate Professor of Art where she teaches all levels of black and white analog photography, historical processes and digital photography.  She also teaches additional subjects including video, digital arts and sustainability.

Ivana is an avid outdoors-woman and Sierra Club member.  She loves to teach photography outdoors on field trips,  go to national parks, and participate in many outdoor adventure sports such as cross country skiing, biking, kayaking, hiking and rock climbing.  She enjoys growing vegetables, cooking, and eating gourmet food with friends and family.

CV 

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Invasives:  Beauty Versus Beauty – Emily Hamilton Laux
Statement

Beauty Versus Beauty addresses issues of biodiversity, the complex relationships of native and invasive species within ecosystems, and individual notions of beauty in nature.

Presented as still lifes and using vintage jars and water to isolate species, this series considers the co-mingled, changing relationships of plants that grow in our backyards, along the edges of fields and parking lots, as well flora that are cultivated for their beauty.

Like the notorious kudzu blanketing rural and urban landscapes in the Deep South, invasive species are often considered beautiful and not acknowledged until they are out of control. Invasive species pose a serious threat to biodiversity; scientists estimate that between 25 and 50 percent of America’s native plants are threatened by invasive species. Yet the issue of biodiversity is an increasingly complex conversation; it is no longer a simplistic “natives versus invasives” paradigm.

Beauty Versus Beauty is the first part of a multi-faceted long-term project on biodiversity.

Bio
Emily Hamilton Laux is an artist who uses photography and installation to examine ideas about the human relationship with internal and external worlds.

Born in Saigon, and raised in Cambodia, Paris and Washington, Laux has an MA from the American University School of International Service and a BA from Tulane University. Previously, Laux worked in financial publishing in New York, London and Hong Kong. In Connecticut, she worked as a photojournalist, gallery manager and arts publicist.

Since 2016, Laux exhibited her work at the Griffin Museum of Photography, and numerous galleries in the Northeast, including the Davis Orton Gallery, the Westport Arts Center, and the Ridgefield Artists Guild, among others.

Laux maintains a studio at Firing Circuits Studios in Norwalk, and is member of the Westport Artists Collective and the Ridgefield Guild of Artists. She lives in Westport, CT.

Website

Flora – Marcy Palmer (In the Griffin Gallery)
Statement
Under the umbrella of the Griffin Museum’s overarching topic of “Down Garden Paths,” Palmer’s Flora is an exploration of beauty as an antidote for personal and political crisis. Writer and philosopher John O’Donohue states, “I think that beauty is not a luxury, but that it ennobles the heart and reminds us of the infinity that is within us.”  That idea resonates with me and inspired this project.  The images are made from plants and flowers gathered during walks in my neighborhood or in my backyard, which are photographed, printed on vellum, and hand applied gold leaf, varnish, and wax to the prints to create the final images.  The project takes reference from Anna Atkins’s botanical studies as well as surrealist photographers who manipulated imagery and materials.

The Flora images are archival inkjet vellum prints with either 24k or 18k gold leaf applied to the back of the print by hand.  The print is then varnished with an archival UV varnish and a wax is applied to the front of the prints.

Bio
Marcy Palmer’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally at The Center for Photographic Art (Carmel, CA), The Griffin Museum of Photography, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, The Berlin Biennial of Fine Art and Documentary Photography (GE), The Brighton Photo Fringe Festival (UK), The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Center for Fine Art Photography, The Photomedia Center, The Watershed Media Centre (UK), Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle, WA, and other venues.  Marcy’s work won Gold in the Fine Art, Abstract category of the PX3, Prix de la Photographie, Paris 2016 awards. Her work was also a finalist in the Fine Art Category for the 7th Edition of the Julia M Cameron Awards.   Marcy has an MFA in Photography & Related Media from the School of Visual Arts and a BS in Studio Art from Skidmore College.

Website

Shibui – Paula Riff
Statement
The Japanese word “shibui” refers to a particular aesthetic of simple, subtle and unobtrusive beauty and it is this concept that reflects the spirit of this series, Shibui. An object of art that employs these characteristics may at first appear to be simple, but upon closer inspection the subtle details and textures balance that simplicity with a rich complexity.

I create camera-less images using the processes of cyanotype and color gum bichromate as a way to physically interact with the natural world as an artist. I cut the paper at various intersections which allows me to enter the conversation with the images in a very intimate way. My intention is to strip away as much as possible so that I am able to focus more on the elements of design and consider elements of nature in a different way.

Gallery talk with Paula Riff on April 11, 2019 at 6:15 PM. Free.

Bio
Paula Riff’s first career did not involve taking pictures. After college, she lived in Tokyo, Japan for several years and upon her return became an interpreter for Japanese production companies in Los Angeles. She switched careers while landing an internship at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the photo department. She also worked at the California Institute of the Arts, taking photos for their publications. Although Paula owns digital and film cameras her new work finds her camera-less, coating her own papers and making photograms. Paula’s work was selected for the Top 50 Critical Mass Award of 2018 and was a finalist in 2018 for the Juliet Margaret Cameron Award in the Alternative Process Category. Her work has appeared in numerous museums, galleries, publications and exhibitions throughout the U.S and internationally. Paula’s work is also held in private collections.

Website

Places For The Spirit, Traditional African American Gardens – Vaughn Sills
Statement
One early September afternoon in 1987, I found myself on the porch of Bea Robinson’s house in Athens, Georgia.  While my friend and Bea chatted about their lives, I looked around and became entranced by Bea’s garden.  Something came over me – or through me – as I stood in the garden, looking, feeling, sensing the energy or magic or spirit, call it what you will, that surrounded me.  On that warm, soft, sunny day I took the first of what became into a series of photographs that I worked on for nearly 20 years.

These photographs document a tradition that is a way of using the land that is both historically significant and aesthetically resonant. Scholars (including my friend Sara Glickman) have studied these gardens and traced many of their traits to West Africa, pointing out similar uses of the land and learning that slaves brought with them not only plant seeds and agricultural skills, but a landscape aesthetic still in evidence today. The gardens, however, are disappearing – or evolving – as we become less rural and more assimilated. There is a distinct influence among ethnic groups, so that features of traditional African American yards are now seen in white gardens and vice-versa. As people move into cities, they tend to assimilate more with the dominant culture, which in our society encourages the use of store-bought planters, “garden furniture,” and even a particular style of landscape design that places one clearly in the middle class.

Seeking traditional gardens, I would travel into the neighborhood in Athens where Bea Robinson lived, that was largely, if not all, African-American, or out into the counties south and east, Oglethorpe, Taliaferro, Greene, Morgan, and Wilkes; I also traveled and photographed throughout the deep southern states, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, North and South Carolina, and Arkansas. I drove through the towns and countryside looking for gardens that felt similar to Bea Robinson’s.

These gardens speak a certain language – a language, I’m convinced, that is about the earth, about beauty, and about spirit. Some of the vocabulary of this language is about cultural mores and spiritual knowledge – the empty bottles, the pipes sticking upright out of the ground, dolls have specific meanings that relate to the spirits of ancestors — and that go back centuries and across an ocean; some of the vocabulary is functional, practical, born of necessity – the vegetable gardens, the chicken coops; and some is quite simply of beauty – the impatiens and petunias and pinks, the rose bushes, prickly pears, and canna lilies.  The way the vocabulary is put together is based on tradition, custom, function, and each gardener’s individual creativity — yielding a distinctive style. This style becomes the structure of the language; this structure is aesthetic; and this aesthetic, to my eye, is beauty.

It’s a language different from the one I grew up with in Eastern Canada or New England, where I live now.  It is a language, though, that I’ve seen and felt before – mostly in the South, mostly in the yards of African-Americans.  It’s a language whose sound is so lyrical that, even though I don’t know the nuances of all the words, I used it to make these photographs.  – VS

Bio
Vaughn Sills’ interests involve how we are influenced by and how we influence the land, how cultures evolve in relation to (and affect) their geography, as well as how individuals become who we are because of our families, social, and environmental circumstances.

Vaughn’s photographs have been exhibited widely in museums and galleries, including the Gibbes Museum in Charleston SC, the DuSables Museum of African American History in Chicago, the US Botanic Garden in Washington, DC and the Carpenter Center of Arts at Harvard University, and the DeCordova Museum. Her gallery exhibits include the Ellen Miller and Davis Orton and Trustman Galleries. Her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, DeCordova Museum, Harvard Art Museum, Eaton Vance, Fidelity, Simmons University, and the now-dispersed Polaroid Collection.

Her work has earned a number of awards. From the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Vaughn received two Artist’s Fellowships in Photography and was twice named a Finalist. She has also received grants from Artadia Dialogue for Art and Culture, the Polaroid Foundation, The New England Foundation for the Arts, and the President’s Fund for Faculty Excellence from Simmons College. Two books of Vaughn’s work have been published: Places for the Spirit, Traditional African American Gardens (Trinity University, 2010) and One Family (University of Georgia, 2001).

Vaughn is a Visiting Scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center and Associate Professor Emerita of Photography at Simmons University. She lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Prince Edward Island, Canada.
CV

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25th Annual Juried Members’ Exhibition
Exhibition dates: July 18 – September 1, 2019
Reception: July 18, 2019 7-8:30 PM
Juror: Julie Grahame
Julie Grahame gallery walk/talk 6:15 PM, July 18, 2019 and will do a curator in residence reviews as well. Reviews are July 19th.
67 Shore Road, Winchester MA 01890

Photo of Julie Grahame by Michael Putland

Juror Julie Grahame’s Statement for the 25th Annual Juried Exhibition: Griffin Museum of Photography
“I like a good challenge and the entrants to the 25th Annual Juried Exhibition certainly gave me one. The volume of good work made it tough, even though I had the right to choose up to 60 images… I chose the full 60 and I could have squeezed in a couple more. This is quite rare, and I hope the artists who were not chosen understand that due to the quality and quantity of entries some good images couldn’t make the cut.

When jurying I want to assess each image on its own caliber, I want to choose things that are not necessarily my personal taste but whose merits are obvious – rating for technicality; composition; originality; a refreshing look at something oft-seen; an entire story in one frame.

In first place, I chose Sunjoo Lee’s “Black Memorabilia” as I found the series so sumptuous, and am looking forward to seeing it in rich print. In second place is Scott Nobles’ fantastic series that made me giggle out loud, so well executed and adorable. Brian Kossof’s “Posts” from his nighttime long exposures has its wonderfully simple elements that make up a poetic image. All together I am pleased with a grand spread of styles and subjects across the 60 finalists.

There were quite a few fantastical images, perhaps a comment on the current state of affairs and a need for escape. Also trending are a look back at family photos, bringing contemporary elements to family histories. It’s always pleasing to see classic work, like a strong but quiet black and white landscape, alongside a fresh digital construction. Thank you to all the artists who shared their vision with me. Keep it fresh!” -JG

* Editor’s note: One photographer withdrew from the exhibit for personal reasons and one photographer didn’t send a photograph for the exhibit. One photograph was eliminated due to it being a second image for one photographer. The Director of the museum chose a director’s prize making the number of images in the exhibit 58.

Exhibitors

Raymond Avitable
Jim Baab
Sandra Bacchi
Craig Becker
Gary Beeber
Sarah Belclaire
Barbara Boissevain
Jen Bilodeau
Jay Boersma
Marilyn Canning
Ellen Cantor
Bill Clark – Honorable Mention
Cheryl Clegg
James Collins
Robert Dash – Honorable Mention
Norm Diamond
Kristen Emack
Heather Evans Smith
Maureen Fahey
Nicholas Fedak II
Jennifer Georgescu
Danielle Goldstein
Anna Grevenitis – Honorable Mention
Silke Hase
Daniel Jackson
Andrew Janjigian
Leslie Jean-Bart
Paul Jett
Jamie Johnson
Marky Kauffmann
Brian Kosoff – Griffin Award
Sunjoo Lee – Richards’ Family Trust Award
Toby MacLennan
Brian Malloy – Honorable Mention
Lawrence Manning
Ralph Mercer
Robert Moran
Bruce Morton
Rebecca Moseman – Honorable Mention
Rita Nannini
Maeda Naohiro
Scott Nobles – Arthur Griffin Legacy Award
Roger Palframan
Marcus Parsons
Zoe Perry Wood
Lori Pond
Astrid Reischwitz – Honorable Mention
Tabitha Robinson
Stanley Rowin
Russ Rowland – Honorable Mention
Gordon Saperia
Janet Smith
David Spink
Alison Stewart
Kathleen Taylor
JP Terlizzi – Honorable Mention
Rich Turk
Yelena Zhavoronkova

Director’s Prize – Patricia Bender

4 exhibitions for June 2020 and July 2020 – Ryan Zoglin and Lauren Ceike/ Melanie Walker and Molly McCall

Member in Focus – Amy Wilton

Purchase Prize – Andrew Janjigian

Mark Feeney’s Globe Review

What Will You Remember’s Review

What Will You Remember’s Interview With Julie Grahame

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See Portal entry in Submission Requirements below. Portal opens morning of February 24, 2019.

AWARDS: $2,500 Richards Family Trust Award, $1,000 Arthur Griffin Legacy Award, $500 Griffin Award, and Honorable Mentions. We will award 4 exhibitions that will take place next June and July 2020. We will award 1 Director’s prize that will result in a catalog and exhibition. We will produce a catalog of the 25th Juried exhibition. We will produce an online exhibition from photographs not chosen by the juror and it will run on Instagram as well. We will award a Member in Focus.

ELIGIBILITY: This Call for Entries is open to all member photographers. Entrants must be members of the Griffin Museum of Photography (with an expiration after 4/1/2019). We do not advocate for members to join the museum just for this juried opportunity only. We always welcome new members as part of our family and offer a broad range of member opportunities. While some opportunities are for long distance members like our on-line classes, we are working on increasing our offerings this year for distance members. There is a membership level for Distance Members. The Griffin Museum invites member photographers working in all mediums, styles and schools of thought to participate. Experimental and mixed techniques are welcome. There is no theme. The juror will choose between 50 – 60 photographs. We ask the juror to TRY not to choose more than one photograph per photographer. The juror will choose the recipients of the monetary awards. We encourage submitting images from a singular, unified body of work for a cohesive selection for the Juried Exhibition. Artwork selected for gallery exhibition will be limited to FRAMED SIZE of 30×40 inches and under.

JUROR: Julie Grahame is the publisher of aCurator.com, a full-screen photography magazine, and the associated aCurator blog, one of the ten best photo sites named by the British Journal of Photography and one of Life.com‘s top 20. She has represented the estate of Yousuf Karsh for licensing for 14 years. Grahame is an independent consultant, reviewer, writer and speaker.

PROGRAMMING: Alongside the juried exhibition, the Griffin Museum will organize a series of professional development workshops presented by a diverse range of thought leaders. These workshops will share instrumental ideas, methods and tools to help build the business and legal foundation of a thriving artistic practice.

HANDLING FEE: The handling fee is $25 for 5 images. We have kept our handling fee very low for many years. *The fee is waived for institutions who have Academic Memberships to the Griffin for their photo students and faculty.

SUBMISSION TIMELINE: February 24 – April 24, 2019 at midnight (We want to get the images to the juror in the last week of April.)

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS:

• Must be a member of the Griffin Museum of Photography through April 2019. Availability to renew membership here.
• All images must be submitted as jpeg files, sized to 1200 px on the longest dimension, 72 dpi is fine, and in Adobe RGB or sRGB color space only.
• Files should be titled as follows: LastName_FirstName_Title_ImageNumber (Ex. Smith_John_Sunset_01, Smith_John_Flower_02)
• All entries that do not adhere to the guidelines above will be rejected.
• $25 Handling Fee
• Upload through our portal  5 images. 8 images can be submitted for members at the dual level ($75) or above.
• We ask for an artist project statement copied and pasted from word file or typed into application.

MAILED SUBMISSIONS:

Please include a title sheet, artist statement and information page including: Name, E-mail, Address, Phone and proof of membership or membership renewal form.

Prepare your images to the same specifications.

Burn images to CD and mail to:

Griffin Museum 25th Juried Submission

67 Shore Road

Winchester, MA 01890

ACCEPTANCE NOTIFICATION:
Selected artists will be posted on the website by June 6th, 2019. Please do not call the Griffin Museum to inquire whether your images were chosen. We have very limited staffing. We will send you a status letter if you were selected or not selected.

IMPORTANT DATES:

• Entries: February 24 – April 24, 2019 at midnight.
• Notice of Acceptance on the website: June 6, 2019 or earlier.
• Final day framed works will be accepted to hang July 9, 2019 although earlier is appreciated.
• Gallery Exhibition at the Griffin Museum: July 18 – Sept 1, 2019
• Opening Reception: July 18, 2019 @ 7pm
• Juror gallery walk/talk 6:15 PM on July 18, 2019. Juror will do a curator in residence review as well. Info to come.

EXHIBIT PRINTS: All accepted images submitted for exhibition must be printed and framed professionally with either glass or plexi. The Griffin Museum recognizes that some work is non-traditional and incorporates the framing as an integral part of the presentation. Artists will be responsible for shipping their framed images to The Griffin Museum in advance of the gallery show and for supplying a pre-paid return-shipping label. The FRAMED size may not exceed 30×40 in. We have found that images mounted on aluminum have a high damage rate. We cannot be held responsible for any damage to photographs mounted on aluminum.

SALES: All work accepted for the gallery show can be for sale. The Griffin Museum will retain a 35% commission on the sale of any work.

 USE RIGHTS: Artists maintain copyright on all of their work. By submission, artists grant The Griffin Museum the right to use their images for the purpose of marketing the exhibition and other Griffin Museum programs; and for reproduction online and in a print exhibition catalogue. Artists grant the use of their image(s) as stated without further contact or compensation from the Griffin. Artist’s recognition is provided with any use. Submitting artists will be added to The Griffin Museum’s monthly newsletter subscriber list. They may opt out using a link on each newsletter at any time.

Please retain this information and your filename information for your files until after announcement of the jury selection.

Statements

Polaroid Possibilities: SX-70 Constructions
As a young artist in 1975 I was given an SX-70 camera as a gift.  I had grown up with Polaroid cameras in our house; my father was a quintessential Polaroid family photographer, shooting a pack or two at every holiday or event.  From roll film to pack film that process left an indelible mark on my photographic sensibility I did not yet know I had.  In 1975 I was a senior in art school at SUNY Geneseo, studying with Michael and Rosemary Teres, my two teachers who opened me up to experimental photographic techniques and combinations of photography and painting.  The SX-70 was a novelty and I really did not know what to do with it.  I photographed soap opera characters off of the TV screen and began to employ the surface manipulation technique that Lucas Samaras had used so effectively in his “Photo-Transformations” series from 1973.

In the fall of 1975 I entered the MA program at the University of Iowa to study with John Schulze.  My work then was primarily experimental black and white processes from solarization to reticulation and composite printing.  My influences were experimental photographers such as Man Ray, Todd Walker, Herbert Bayer and Jerry Uelsmann.  Equally important were the influences of painters such as Rene Magritte, Max Ernst and Francis Bacon.  At a studio shoot arranged by the students I brought the SX-70 camera in addition to my 35 mm equipment.  A fellow grad student, Rick Valencenti also had an SX-70 camera and told me about a stripping technique he was using to take apart his images, remove some of the emulsion and replace it with paint or collage elements.  That to me was a revelation and I quickly abandoned my surface manipulated SX-70s in favor of what I would refer to as “emulsion stripping”.  In a short time, this became my primary means of image making.  Having combined alternative process photographs with paint for several years prior it was a natural to replace the SX-70 removed sections with acrylic paint, ink drawing and collage elements.  The true beauty of the process is that it was all done from behind, leaving the SX-70 frame intact and from the front it appeared as if it was a normal SX-70 photograph.  For me this was part of the aesthetic, this perfect consumer photographic process generating these surrealist scenes as apparent instant moments.  It fit well with my belief that photography was a mythic medium and that its verisimilitude was an illusion. – JR

Polaroid Possibilities: Polacolor Image Transfers
When SX-70 film was changed in the late 70s it rendered my techniques impossible and I needed to find a new medium that could replace that excitement and creative working experience.  For a year I dabbled with my own invention of a hybrid film type, combining 4×5 Polacolor negative and SX-70 positive.  It was such an obscure medium that people did not know what they were.  I moved on to Polacolor Image Transfer for a number of reasons, the primary one was the desire to work on paper as well accessing the larger scales that the film offered.  I had worked on paper in many of my drawing and painting classes in college so was really comfortable adding color and marks to the transferred photographic image.  In the later years of reworking the SX-70s and the 4×5 hybrids I began to use an airbrush to apply the paint inside the frame.   I carried this over to the 8×10 Polacolor transfers I made in 1981 and it was my preferred way to apply paint for several years.  The earliest 8x10s, such as “Sympathy” shows the airbrush off as the gouache partly obscures the background to bring the photographic image out of context.  All of the early series was shot live with an 8×10 Deardorf camera.  Despite the beauty of the image quality from the large negative I was more interested in the fact that it was on paper and soon sought out different ways to capture that image.  I began to experiment with video as a source image, which was a precursor to working with digital input in the early 90s.

By 1983 I was creating image transfers with the 20×24 camera even though controlling a floppy negative that large was difficult.  The dyes did not always make it perfectly on the paper and it took me several years to figure out that this could be a good thing if I only adopted a more painterly approach to the reworking process. From 1987 through the early 90s the 20×24 transfers were my exclusive method of working.  There were two main series, first the Androgyne from 1987 and 1988 and then the Spirit of Pere La Chaise series depicting the statuary from the famous cemetery in Paris.  As this second series progressed the reworking technique morphed from paint to the use of pastel and dry pigment, rendering the final image with fresco like surfaces.  In the early 90s I was invited to photograph at the building that would become the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.  With abandoned spaces from the late years of the  19^th Century they became great backdrops for me to combine digitally with figures from my own collection of 19^th Century tintypes and cabinet cards.  These were produced in both 8×10 format as well as 20×24 and the treatment was very different.  The 8x10s were lightly colored and enhanced while the 20x24s employed the more painterly look of the pigment and pastel.

By the late 90s I began to use digital technology more thoroughly and while occasional single pieces were completed as late as 2001 I consider the body of work to have concluded in 1999.  In 2017 I decided to create two new 4 panel pieces for an exhibit of the transfer work.  It was the first time I returned to the process in 16 years.
– JR

Bio
John Reuter was born in Chicago and raised in California and New York.  He attended undergraduate school at SUNY Geneseo and graduate school at the University of Iowa, receiving an MFA in 1978.  By the end of 1978 he had taken a position at Polaroid as a research photographer and in 1980 moved over to be the main photographer in the 20×24 Studio.  From 1980 and through the 1990s the 20×24 program became the cornerstone of the Polaroid Artist Support Program.  The New York studio was a key part of that program and Reuter worked with artists William Wegman, Joyce Tenneson, Chuck Close, Mary Ellen Mark, David Levinthal, Robert Rauschenberg, Ellen Carey and many others.

Throughout those years Reuter strove to continue his own artistic pursuits despite the full time schedule of the studio.  The SX-70 work, which deconstructed the film packet to introduce painted and collage elements was the first major body of work he created with Polaroid materials.  Rendered obsolete by technical changes to the SX-70 film this work remains a favorite of the artist.  Seeking a new format Reuter began working with Polacolor II peel-apart film in 1981 to create images with the “image transfer process”.  This process allowed the dyes from the film negative to be printed on watercolor paper in lieu of the shiny and sharp Polacolor positive.  This became a starting point for a reworking process that enhanced or transformed the image with materials such as retouching dyes, watercolor, pastel and dry pigment.  Scale could now be part of the process as Reuter employed 8×10, 20×24 and multiple 20×24 panels to create works up to 40×50 inches.

By the late 90s Reuter began the transition to digital imaging and no longer made the final prints with Polaroid materials.  He continued to run the 20×24 camera for other artists as it remained part of the soon to be bankrupt Polaroid Corporation.  By 2008 he was able to work with Elsa Dorfman and her investor friend Dan Stern to purchase a significant amount of the 20×24 film inventory, camera and production equipment.   The camera and original Polaroid film remain viable and are still available for artists and photographers to use.

In 2014 Reuter embarked on a documentary film project titled “Camera Ready: The Polaroid 20×24 Project.  It chronicles the origins and history of the project with interviews with artists, writers, curators and some key people at Polaroid who made it possible to survive beyond the demise of the company itself.

Reuter remains the Director of the 20×24 Studio and is also an adjunct professor of photography at the Hartford Art School.

CV

Website

Curator’s Statement

About the Curator, Barbara Hitchcock
Barbara Hitchcock, former Cultural Affairs director, joined Polaroid Corporation in the 1970s in a research and development capacity. In 1978 Hitchcock joined Polaroid’s international division publicity department where she frequently appeared as a Polaroid spokesperson on national and international television/radio broadcasts.

Since 1982, Hitchcock was responsible for the strategic marketing communications and program planning, development and execution of Polaroid’s cultural activities. She acquired fine art photographs for Polaroid, managed its multi-million dollar art collections and its traveling exhibitions. She has been the curator of numerous exhibitions and has authored essays for many publications, most recently Desire for Magic: Patrick Nagatani 1978 – 2008; Private Views: Barbara Crane; Victor Raphael: Travels and Wanderings; The Polaroid Book; Emerging Bodies: Nudes from the Polaroid Collection and The Polaroid Project: At the Intersection of Art and Technology.

Hitchcock has served as a juror for several non-profit galleries, for ASMP of New England and for the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

In 2006, the Griffin Museum of Photography presented its Focus Award to Hitchcock for her critical contributions to the promotion of photography as a fine art. She received a Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to photography from the Photographic Resource Center in 2010.

Hitchcock received a BA in English from Skidmore College, a PDM certificate from Simmons Graduate School of Management, and honors in business administration and journalism at Boston College.

Curator’s Statement
John Reuter is an artist. He makes photographs and videos, draws and paints, and yet he is perhaps most well-known as the individual behind the hands-on magic of the giant Polaroid 20×24 camera; a person who sets aside his own aesthetic and artistic practice in order to help his fellow artists realize on film what each envisions in his or her imagination. His creativity, technical abilities and generous spirit are gifts that he shares to insure their success.

When Reuter turns his energies to creating his own artwork, he often photographs cabinet cards, tintypes, antique paintings and similar items from his collection. As these images made with SX-70 films develop, he cuts, peels apart, pushes, scrapes, paints, and collages the film’s interior surfaces, transforming his subjects into newly conjured images with reconstructed narratives. These final SX-70 miniatures pay homage to the giants of Surrealism and Expressionism – Herbert Bayer, Max Ernst, Lucas Samaras and Moholy-Nagy, among others – the luminaries who influence Reuter’s unconventional artistry.

The landscape which has been classically portrayed for centuries in art — crosses from traditional perspectives to unexpected, dreamlike impressions when Reuter mixes digital infrared “film” with his idiosyncratic view of botanical gardens. Have we entered Alice’s Wonderland?

Using various formats of Polaroid Polacolor film, Reuter takes advantage of the exposed instant film’s characteristic transfer of dyes from the negative to watercolor paper that he substitutes for the film’s standard positive. The color dyes don’t always transfer completely, a flaw that Reuter seizes as an invitation to fashion what he sees in his mind’s eye. In Reuter’s hands, oil pastels, airbrushed acrylics and dry pigments facilitate the image’s metamorphosis from traditional photograph to fresco-like artifact.  Consequently, straight photographs of family members, funerary statues, Renaissance maidens and religious figures are reimagined. Harkening back to the ideals of Romanticism, what was corporeal is no longer; it has become ethereal and transient, diaphanous and mutable.

“Shadows and Traces: The Photography of John Reuter” celebrates the artist’s innovative exploration of film technology, photography and painting coupled with his imaginative reinterpretation of people, places and things that have populated the real world. Reuter reinvents the past, stimulates our imagination, and encourages us to enjoy this flight into a familiar, yet somewhat unconventional, alternative universe.

Barbara P. Hitchcock
Independent Curator and former Curator, The Polaroid Collections

Mark Feeney Boston Globe Review

Suzanne Révy What Will You Remember

The Eye of Photography