Gallery Photographers Image City Feature Articles
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All images copyright by the individual photographers Jerusalem (ISR 1995 # 112) Bruce’s goal for his photography is to “. . .
communicate, as clearly as possible the lives and circumstances of his
subjects.” His eleven photos in this exhibit plainly achieve that
target. He includes all sorts of people, young and old, praying, armed
soldiers in the street with civilians, a father reading to his child and
a market scene. Three people standing together in what appears to be a
market, caught my attention. Three is such a wonderful, one might say a
perfect number. Possibly a family, the three are framed by their
surrounding; the market wagon to the left of the photo, the empty space
to the right and the shaft of light from behind. Often, we wish to crop
our photos to what may be the subject of our image. However, Bruce
decided to leave the empty space to the right, thus creating a more
powerful effect of the light shaft through the vaulted ceiling which
acts as a line to draw our eyes back to the family. Whether the family
owns the cart of they just happened to stop at this spot is unclear; the
girl looks curiously at the camera, the woman at the various bird cages
on the cart and the man into the distance. Perhaps he is considering
walking further into the area under the vaulted ceiling where there
seems to be more activity. The light on the people is muted adding to
the mystery. Bruce gives us much to consider about the people and this
place in Jerusalem in this well composed and lighted image.
Dunes When you remove the color from a photo, magic can
happen. A cool composition becomes more bold, more dramatic. Images gain
a timelessness that allows our viewers to focus on messages that
transcends the here and now.
Michael’s Dunes does exactly that.
If not for the title, I’d think I was looking at an iceberg with
snow lightly blown across the tops of enormous blocks of ice whose front
surfaces were etched when they were forced out of the frozen water. I
expect to see some sort of human existence in the scrapple of the
foreground.
Path to the Sea It’s no surprise to find another beautiful set
of Black and White photographs from Tom, and it’s difficult to pick only
one. But this image is
particularly striking, inviting us into an exploration. The immediacy of the stairs and railing at the
bottom of the photograph begins a visual journey down this long
staircase winding down, down, down.
Then the sands appear – sands that could on first glance to be
either water or the sky.
But as our view continues to the top of the photograph, there is
the sea with the waves flowing in.
That sense of looking down is amplified by the fact there is no
visible horizon and offers a perspective we seldom experience in a
landscape photograph. The image carries a wide range of textures both
at fine level within the many structural elements of the image and also
at a macro level among those very same elements.
The surf rolling in, the smooth sand beach, the rocky edge of
that sand, and then the rough corridor on either side of the stairs
extending from the viewer’s location to the shore below.
Each element has a shape and they fit together bounded by a
beautiful network of curves. All these elements, and the photograph that can
offer something new each time we look at it is a special gift, and this
one is such a gift.
Night's End Pat Luke is a past president of the Professional
Photographers Society of New York State (PPSNYS). Locally, Pat is known
as the “McGiver of lighting” as he often creates his own photographic
tools. He specializes in
student senior and sports photos, product photography and portraits. As
this photo, “Night's End” illustrates, Pat is an excellent photographer,
period! Black and white photography is about shape, form, line, texture,
and tonality. This image has all those qualities and it’s as crisp and
tight as that little black dress!
It takes a master photographer to know when to
break “rules.” There is a “rule” that you should leave space in front of
moving subjects. Pat didn’t do that, but by this positioning he lends
truth to the title that this is about nights end, as most of it is being
left behind. There is a
“rule” about truncating heads and feet, but here the head and feet would
disrupt the “curve” that makes this image so strong. The position of the
model was carefully determined by the photographer to create the same
curve we would expect a landscape photographer to make. The dangling
shoes help to fill the frame and to indicate where this person come from
and perhaps wants to return. Finally, the soft white background is not
just negative space. You can barely see the soft door and window in the
background. Again, a reference to the place this person may have been. All of Pat’s photographs in this collection are
“clean” and “sharp.” No mistakes. This one, in my opinion is the best of
the bunch.
Town of Paxson Peter J. Sucy has chosen to depict the Alaskan
wilderness in an array of Interwoven horizontal and curving lines add to the
dimensionality and poetry of this vast rugged Peter has given us the tool to formulate a story
about this awe-inspiring yet formidable and intimidating
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Image City Photography Gallery ♦ 722 University Avenue ♦ Rochester, NY 14607 ♦ 585.271.2540 In the heart of ARTWalk in the Neighborhood of the Arts |