FotoFest 2012 | Chapter VIII: Tuesday Afternoon

Leah Sobsey, Rhyolite, NV, from the series Nothing Is As It Seems link

Seeing through barriers

Inside or outside? A question that is spatial, cultural, intellectual, and emotional. Finished up my stint with some intriguing social observers and formalists.

• Jane Paradise - a photographer I curated on the PRC web site (Not Quite Strangers on NEO, October 2010) - wanted to get my help in reconsidering that edit of her work, whether she could refocus those images on human experiences of museum spaces 
• Frederic Weber - sick, couldn't make it to Houston, but sent his wife with his startling, and startlingly simple, color prints that concentrate on children's art and visions  link
• Sylwia Kowalczyk - a Pole living in Edinborough - portraits that address ethnicity in its fine details - in doing the portraits Sylwia creates a firmer footing for herself in this very different place  link
• Lori Pond - Lori showed the only phone camera photos I saw, which was something of a surprise - when I asked if she used Instagram, she made it clear, from a list of apps and software I've never heard of, that her goal is prints, not dissemination via the Internet as so many of us are - and the prints were quite fascinating, part of an attractive portfolio that addressed a variety of landscape issues  link
• Don Glentzer - one of the most challenging portfolios I reviewed, because its insistence on the flattest of materials, like ink on glass, made the optics of his project Point of Chance as thin as a membrane  link

FotoFest 2012 | Chapter VII: Tuesday Morning

Johanna Evans-Colley, Legs, Miami, 2011  link

 Blending visions

Joined by student observer Tom Turner (pursuing his MFA at Texas Tech University) on the last day of the 2012 Meeting Place reviews. He behaved himself very well, though he did abandon me for one session after lunch to go and photograph room 2016 after I packed and checked out; apparently his current project involves just such post-guest, pre-housekeeping rooms. Keep your eyes open for a photo of shoes in a bathroom wastebasket.

• Christopher Schneberger – the only portfolio I saw that included 3-D imagery, employed to give extra credibility to a contrived story about Frances Naylor, a legless girl who learns to levitate – a keen sense of historic syntax helps Chris fashion credible narratives, including a contemporary tale of a domestic ghost, a young girl from the early 20th century visible only in reflections  link
• Vivian Keulards – a Dutch view of America, limited in time to about 3 years and set in area code 80439 (Denver vicinity) – what she records are memories she doesn’t trust her mind to recollect – largely interactions with people whose ties to place are both remarkable and mundane but somehow distinctive  link
• K.K. (Kim) DePaul – a stunning story of family secrets and the impact on the individual, told in fragments of archival materials, self-portraits, collage, and writing  link to video about project

FotoFest 2012 | Chapter VI: Monday Afternoon

Cale Merege from his series Seekers

 Evanescence

 Feeling the glow of FotoFest now, really hitting my stride in finding simpatico space with visitors to the table. Even those whose work doesn't seem likely to stay with me still elicits useful commentary (or so it seems from my side).

• Ryan Zoghlin - a true photographic polyglot - we worked hard to find a terse, descriptive phrase that would encompass all of his projects and interests - from objets d'oeil (sorry, Francophones) to images of automated tellers, from power plants and other less-then-desirable backyard neighbors to cyanotypes of surfers and orotones of stunt planes (he calls them "Aerotones," naturally), Ryan is wondrously inventive and productive - treat yourself to a browse around his site  link
• Cale Merege - Seekers - concise, enigmatic assessments of humanity versus urbanity - "portraits" offering visual equivalents of estrangement, alienation, ambiguity, and anonymity within modern cities  link
• Lisa Elmaleh - a fresh pair of eyes brought to bear on an ancient topic, the landscape of the Everglades - a la Ben Dimmick earlier this trip, and Stuart Rome (the carpetbagger from Philadelphia) last year, encountering the dilemma of visualizing overgrowth and finding resolve amidst chaos - Lisa may be seeking traces of her photographer father - she is not doing this the easy way, or even his way; she's using wet-plate collodion, and making grandly expressive silver prints  that reflect an entirely different perspective from the two elder male visions noted before  link
• Sarah Sampedro - finally, a Minnesotan! - happy to make time at day's end for someone I know is around the Twin Cities but has made the significant effort and investment to get to Houston for the event - Sarah's multi-faceted, self-reflexive investigations into motherhood and family life are poignant and intense  link