Best of Light Sensitive 2014
The Art Intersection Staff selected three artists from eighty-nine artists in the Light Sensitive exhibition, our signature traditional photography exhibition, to have their own exhibition called “Best of Light Sensitive 2014”. This year Tom Persigner, photographer, writer, and the founder of F295, juried Light Sensitive and selected work for the exhibition in March and April, 2014. Images from Light Sensitive 2014.
Douglas Collins – I make photographs without using a camera – or, in the case of these works, without even a darkroom. In my work I reject accepted forms of photographic meaning, but try instead to create moments of lucidity through a meditation on form and intention. This tends to minimalistic results, and the pictures are often purified of all but essential structure. I set my own rules but often live by violating them. In place of traditional approaches I invest in a deep contemplation on the physical materials of the photographic act itself, in the tradition of Fox Talbot. I live and work in New York City.
These works are chemigrams, a type of photographic art made without a camera and without a darkroom. In this process, black and white photographic paper is exposed to daylight and then is coated with a varnish, which functions as a resist. By soaking the paper in fixer and developer alternately, the resist is gradually lifted, and color is created by the physical effects on silver grains in the emulsion that result from a certain rhythm of soaking. The artist may intervene, attacking the paper with knives, sticks, or hands to induce additional imagery. The process has antecedents going back to the origin of photography.
Mary Donato – Following my retirement in 2006 after 30 years as a research geologist, I began to explore photography and printmaking as ways to satisfy both my analytical and creative impulses. I have no formal training in fine art or photography, nor was I given a vintage camera by an aging relative when I was a child. Nevertheless, I consider myself a fully-engaged amateur photographer and printmaker who combines 21st-century digital devices with 19th-century printing processes to create handmade photographic images.
I am compelled to explore the ephemeral beauty of everyday life, sometimes in deliberate compositions, but more often in incidental situations. These prints display a range of scale and chroma. They represent my efforts to convey a mood or a visual idea, and nothing more. Producing unique prints by hand seems the perfect approach for such imagery.
Erin K Malone – Located in San Francisco, California, Erin Malone spends her days as a User Experience Design Consultant while wishing she was out in the field with her cameras. She received her first camera at 10 and taking it to Girl Scout camp, she promptly left it behind.
A few years later and being much more responsible, she purchased her first manual SLR. Photo classes in high school and serving on the newspaper as a photographer, began her foray into “real” photography.
Coming full circle, Erin primarily works with film, vintage, plastic and lensless cameras and in historic and alternative processes.
Erin’s photos have been shown in group and juried exhibitions across the United States, they have won several awards and are in a few collections, including the Museum of Fine Art, Houston. Her work has been featured in publications such as B&W Magazine, Diffusion, Light Leaks and San Francisco Magazine and the San Francisco PBS produced program KQED Quest.
About the Juror
Tom Persinger is a photographer, writer, and the founder of F295. His photographs have been shown in numerous exhibitions and are in private collections in the United States, Europe, and Japan. His work has been featured in many publications, including Afterimage, Ag, Photo.net, View Camera, and many books on photographic technique and processing.
Persinger has lectured at colleges and universities, leads hands-on workshops, and is a member of Freestyle Photographic’s Advisory Board of Photographic Professionals. His first book Photography Beyond Technique: Essays from F295 on the Informed use of Alternative and Historical Photographic Processes will be released by Focal Press/Taylor and Francis in Spring 2014.
He is especially interested in contemporary photography that considers in its manufacture the intersections of process, subject, and content and the work that can be created in that exciting intersection. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two sons.
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