Constellations

A Survey of New Photography

Dates: July 28-September 9, 2018
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 4, 5-8 pm
Location: Kaaterskill Fine Arts Gallery, Hunter Village Square, Main Street, Hunter
Gallery Hours: Friday, Saturday & Monday, 11 am-5:30 pm; Sunday 11 am-4:00 PM
More Information: 518 263 2060

Image credit: "Cardinal," by Portia Munson, courtesy of PPOW Gallery

Featuring Work By

Gwen Adler • Jo Andres • Ted Barron • Laura Blacklow
Janyce Erlich-Moss • Amy Friend • Randi Ganulin • Jared Handlesman
Tania Houtzager • Letitia Huckaby* • Joni Kabana • Alon Koppel
Laura Kurtenbach • Paula Lalala • Peter Brown Leighton • J. Fredric May
Portia Munson** • Fawn Potash • S. Gayle Stevens • Molly Stinchfield • Morgan Ford Willingham
* work courtesy of Liliana Block Gallery
** work courtesy of PPOW Gallery

 

On Photography

Since William Henry Fox Talbot published in 1839 his photographic process in “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing” (Talbot created impressions of objects by placing them on paper sensitized with sodium chloride and silver nitrate. He called them “photogenic drawings.”) the medium of photography has continued to baffle and amaze an excited and ever expanding audience willing to see the beauty of the mundane as well as the extraordinary of unexplainable mysteries, minute and grand, that make up our universe.

The 1800s are filled with technical milestones for taking and making photographs:  from Talbot’s early experiments and Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre’s invention of the Daguerreotype, also in 1839, to Sir John Herschel’s creating the cyanotype process in 1842 to Louis Désiré’ Blanquart-Evrard’s method of albumen prints, to Frederick Scott Archer’s introduction of the wet colloidal process to the tintype process patented in the United States by Hamilton Smith to the first commercially availability of silver gelatin prints in 1874 and George Eastman, in 1888, marketing the Kodak No. 1 box camera (“You press the button, we do the rest”) … whew — what a century of accomplishments!  

The democratization of photography has come into full view since the inventions of the digital camera (1975, Steven Sasson) and the camera phone (2000). From cabinet photo portraits (1866) to Alphonse Bertillon’s modern mugshots (1885) to todays “selfies”, we seem unendingly interested in photographing each other and ourselves. (What are we trying to capture?)

While mass media is consumed by digital photographic images, all of the other “alternative” means of making photographs are also in full bloom. We have attempted, as part of our 20th anniversary celebration, to offer, Constellations: A Survey of New Photography, which offers ample evidence that there are as many ways to producing a photographic work of art as there are artists making them.

—Robert Tomlinson, Kaaterskill Fine Arts Gallery Director