Michael Sebastian : 52 miles

Project statement:

For the last several years I've driven a 52-mile commute to my medical practice in a small city in central Kentucky. I depart my suburban home, travel a busy stretch of interstate highway to my job, and reverse the trip at day's end. I traverse a lush, sparsely populated semi-rural landscape, marked by the presence of people I mostly donʼt see. I view their homes and playgrounds; their businesses and industrial sites; their rural hamlets and suburban shopping malls. Isolated within my car, apart from these unseen people, I already feel I'm The Other.

I drive, thinking of the day to come, or the day gone by, steering autonomically while my mind sifts what my eyes feed it. The siren calls of color, light, geometry, and form beckon me to stop to shoot at once, or to return later. I respond superficially to the many lovely scenes I encounter; who doesn't love a "pretty" picture? But I also sense the incongruities and oddities, and the manicured faux-perfection that betrays the human impulse to impose order around oneself. However I approach, I photograph as an interloper in places where I rarely feel fully at home. This tension, between visual attraction and emotional discomfort, is why Iʼve returned time and again, camera on the seat beside me.

The vague anxiety this tension provokes prods me to shoot quickly, and return to the familiar confines of the car. But "quick" isn't so easy when wielding an eight-pound manual camera, or reloading finite rolls of film. Iʼve shot this work on medium-format color-negative film for its ability to render complex, multi-dimensional information on a large plane of whatever emulsion best suits the day's light. But the cameras' physical heft and cumbersome operation are also soothing impediments to the task at hand. I must stop, compose, focus, and shoot; and though I donʼt linger, neither can I easily heed the voice that screams, "you don't belong here," and hasten back to the comfort of the commuter's hermetically-sealed isolation.

Artist Share: Sara K Byrne

Sara K Byrne

Exploded Flowers

Just because it's awesome

Norman Sarachek

Norman Sarachek

He is the first of many artists I have researched that strictly works with chemigrams!!! They are pretty fantastic.  He has worked both with and without resists which creates varied effects in his work.  I really enjoyed the fact that he added in his website little "tid-bits" of information about how he created some effects.  It helps give me some insight into how I should go about chemigrams.

He refers to his work as a mix between photography, printmaking, and painting.  I think that's an interesting way to approach chemigrams because it forces you to have to think that way. Even though a lot of it is left up to chance, certain decisions can help create real artwork as opposed to some crazy chemical stained paper.

He also gives a fantastic explanation in his statement: "Varying the concentration, flow, and time of the contact of the chemicals with the paper allows me to control the lightness, color tone, and composition of the image background.....Unlike most working with chemigrams, the resist I use is a "soft" one, lending itself to rapid gestural creation of images-often in 30 seconds or less as opposed to thirty minutes or more when a "hard" resist or varnish is used."

This now explains to me why my coconut oil resist didn't work too well........

I also love this quote from him "Inherent in my work is risk taking - balancing control and chance."

http://www.nsarachek.com/nsarachek_web_site/chemigrams_Norman_Sarachek.html 

VALERIE BURKE

Valerie Burke

Valerie Burke is a former adjunct professor at Columbia College Chicago who currently lives in Fort Collins, Colorado. She has a strong interest in pinhole photography and uses both traditional pinholes and digital pinholes of a digital camera with a pinhole accessory instead of a lens.

Through the Pinhole Statement:

"My early pinhole photography was a means of getting in touch with myself .  I used the patio for taking the images.  It was the stage for my personal dramas and the yard a jungle which had grown up around me over years I was occupied raising a family.

The pinhole cameras I used to take the pictures were a hatbox and a bathroom hamper; both were laden with domestic memories.  The use of a pinhole camera was a 19th century manner of shooting.  The simplicity of its means--no lens and no film but sunlight poring through a tiny opening in a piece of copper spread out the memories of years over a paper negative cinching content and means.

The pinhole also gave vent to a personal preoccupation with playfulness, exploration and risk taking."

These are images of her pinhole cameras:

This is the 2/3 mirrorless camera used with a pinhole accessory to take the images in the Florals Gallery 

Hatbox pinhole camera 

Pinhole Camera Bathroom Hamper 

Through the Pinhole:

Floral:

The Yukon Series

"The Yukon series combined my interest in pinhole photography and scanograms with digital technology and demonstrated that such disparate technologies can in fact share the same space of artistic expression.  The meditative effects and implied imagery are impressions made as light pinged off reflective surfaces. I floated sheets of stainless steel over a flatbed scanner to reflect its colored light, creating a one-time only landscape for the pinhole image. I then layered the imagery with natural objects and oriental papers. I housed my intimate landscapes in handmade paper boxes."

Valerie's photography has been exhibited at the Illinois State Museum, Chicago, Illinois. The Lofoten International Art Center, Svolvaer, Norway; The Chicago Cultural Center, Klein Art Works, Chicago, Illinois; The Midwest Photographer's project, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; the Sixth Annual New York Digital Salon, The Visual Arts Museum, New York, and the Center for Fine Arts Photography, Fort Collins, Colorado among others.

Her work has been published in several editions of the Pinhole Journal as well as Leonardo magazine.

Valerie's photographs are held in the collection of the California Museum of Photography, Riverside, California; the Graham Nash Collection of Photography, Encino, California, the National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington,D.C.; and the Pinhole Resource Center, San Lorenzo, New Mexico.