CIRCLING

A loop encircles the farm where I grew up. I know it so well. I can close my eyes and picture the twists and turns of the road, the light sifting through the trees, the reflections in the river. When I can’t sleep, I imagine leaving home and setting out to walk the loop. If I move slowly, I rarely get past the first mile before I drift off.  

After my mother died, I began to make pictures of my childhood landscape. This terrain is inextricably interwoven into who I am today and how I see the world. My own genetic material comes as much from the landscape as it does from my family. The trees are the grandparents I never had. For me, being in this landscape feels a bit like being in a place of worship. The meditative quiet allows my mind to empty out and reorder thoughts in a way that seems manageable and clear.  

Through photographing this familiar landscape, as well as my mother’s objects, I am beginning the process of grieving her loss and coming to grips with my own mortality. These images channel my thoughts and feelings as I work through the brew of emotion that surrounds this phase of life. The passage of time can be such a dizzying blur and it has all caught up with me rather abruptly. As I travel these familiar roads, I feel as though I am on something of an archeological dig, unearthing and exploring a time capsule of lost memories and regret. I am trying to understand who and where I have been all these years, and most importantly, the promise of what comes next.

About

Margaret Lampert is a photographer based in Cambridge Massachusetts. Growing up on a dairy farm north of Boston with two very visual parents, she was influenced by art and the natural world in equal measure. Margaret studied Art History & English at the University of New Hampshire and just after graduating college she began working in the department of Prints, Drawings & Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Here, while assisting the acting curator of the photography collection, Margaret fell in love with the medium and, with little technical knowledge but a head full of pictures she set out to become a photographer. Through apprenticeships and workshops she honed her skills and has been making pictures ever since. With her background in fiction writing and art history, and a deep curiosity in human nature, Margaret seeks to create visually and emotionally compelling narratives through portraiture and landscape. 

Lyn Swett Miller

Still, In Motion

In May 2022, we buried my mother on a bed of compost she and I created together. Surrounded by the mycorrhizae she loved, my mother was now in the care of others and I was free from my 56 year responsibility to make her happy. Since birth, my job had been to bring joy and distraction after my brother Paul, whom I never knew, died of ‘crib death.’ Over the decades, this expectation wore me down. 

After my mother died, I kept her spirit, and the spirits of other women in my life at arms length, creating still lives with their belongings. Over time those belongings beckoned. Still, In Motion is my first foray into self-portraiture. Playing dress-up with vintage clothes belonging to women I’ve loved and lost and working with props, like childhood photographs, an old cigarette and a vintage frame, I danced to the other side of grief, emerging in a grove of trees I created during my mother’s final year. 

These ritualistic ‘performances’ were a wondrous three-way conversation with my camera, the objects at hand and my grief. Along the way, I processed Mummy and me. She loved to walk alone in the woods, something that made me afraid; I loved to dance, something that made her self-conscious. Mummy read about ‘gutsy gals;’ I wanted to be one. Through it all, we are still, in motion. She’s becoming one with the soil; I’m becoming me.

About

Lyn Swett Miller is a micro-climate photographer happiest mucking around with the detritus of her life. While investigating compost, landfills and other aspects of our material world, she creates visual meditations on the power of regeneration, transformation and renewal.

Miller lives in Hanover, NH where she has spent the past fifteen years trying to figure out what it takes for a suburban family of four to live sustainably. She is a founding member of the Sustainable Hanover Committee and has found a voice for her activism through photography. Over time, compost became her muse and metaphor.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Miller is an art history graduate from Harvard College with an MBA and a Masters in Teaching. Miller’s first solo show, “Compost Compositions,” was in 2019. Since then, her work has been in numerous juried exhibitions throughout the United States. Her most recent solo exhibition, “Compost: Muse & Metaphor,” was at WinCam at The Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts (Fall 2022).

Gordon Saperia

Threshold of a Dream

Drifting towards sleep, I see dimly lit, vaguely familiar landscapes that continuously transform. These visions are the inspiration for the places I create in my photographic montages, each a fusion of elements from photographs taken around the world. Combining vistas and fields, a palette of exaggerated colors, and surprising juxtapositions, these places express a tension between the intimate and the mysterious. Like my visualizations, they are both odd and oddly familiar. In Threshold of a Dream, I invite you to explore these new worlds with me. 

About

Gordon Saperia is a Boston based lens artist whose primary focus is the creation of dream-like composite images of the natural world. These colorful fantasies are assembled from photographs of previously visited, worldwide landscapes and are infused with his memory of how he felt being there. 

Saperia’s photographs have been included in juried and invited exhibitions at the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, the A Smith Gallery, and the Concord Art Association, as well as many other venues. Additionally, his work has been published in the Photographic Society of America (PSA) Journal, and he was the project manager for The Focused Eye – Our Unique Views, a unique outdoor banner installation in Boston’s Seaport District during the summer of 2021. 

While mostly self-taught, Gordon has studied photography with established educators including Marc Muench, Keith Carter, Susan Burnstine, Betty Wiley, Emily Belz, and most recently Valda Bailey. In his former life, he had a long and satisfying career in medicine, first as an interventional cardiologist and subsequently as an editor of online medical content for healthcare professionals. 

He is represented by Copley Society for Art, Boston, MA.

Cassandra Goldwater

Constructed Memory

Memory is unreliable. As eyewitnesses of our own pasts, we create a narrative that, while grounded by evidence as simple as a bird’s nest or a worn suitcase, must be rounded out by fiction–a crafted memory that reflects a single voice, a single point of view.

In Constructed Memory, a series of still lifes and landscapes, I craft a personal narrative that acknowledges the pain of the sudden loss of a father and being raised by a thirty-seven-year-old widow with four children under twelve and no real family supports. Shaped in part by nostalgia, and a longing for home and identity, I use bits of collections – family heirlooms and found objects– to orchestrate the fiction that is memory.

About

Cassandra Goldwater uses photography to wrestle with current events and histories both personal and political. While many of her images combine found objects, she is also drawn to the interplay of the natural environment with her imagination. 

Her photographs have been shown in many group exhibitions including those at the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Davis Orton Gallery, the SE Center for Photography, the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Art, and on the Curated Fridge. 

Goldwater has studied photography at the DeCordova Museum, the New England School of Photography, New Hampshire Institute of Art, and the Griffin Museum of Photography.  Additionally, she has taken workshops with Cig Harvey at the Santa Fe Workshops and with Sean Kernan at the North Country Workshops. 

Goldwater teaches composition at UMass Lowell and her commentary on the photographic work of Jennette Williams and Jellen van Meene appeared in the Women’s Review of Books. A lifelong New Englander, she currently resides in the small city of Lowell, Massachusetts where it is rumored a renaissance is in the making.

Diane Bennett

Training Grounds

As a street photographer, I frequently observe children at play. Sometimes children make the rules; sometimes adults direct the experience. Either way, children’s play is usually serious work, rehearsal for future roles and expectations as they explore the world. 

In this project, Training Grounds, I use children’s play as a mirror to examine broader trends in American culture. Though often unobserved, what our children experience through play is likely to shape their assumptions and aspirations – and reveal the undercurrents of our own values.

About

With or without a camera, Diane Bennett asks herself: Where is the emotion in these surroundings? This long-standing focus informs her B&W photography, merging street-level reality, broader myth and personal resonance in the moment of capture. None of her images are staged or materially manipulated, following the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) guidelines. She searches the real, looking for the really real.  

Bennett’s series, Elastic Sidewalk, has had solo exhibitions at the Griffin Museum of Photography and Concord MA Library Art Gallery. Her images have been included in many juried shows: the LA Center of Photography, Fitchburg Art Museum, Whistler House Museum of Art, Photographic Resource Center Boston, Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, SE Center for Photography and The Curated Fridge.

Bennett attributes her early visual education to living and working in New York City, with its diversity, art institutions and storied history of street photography. Coursework at the Griffin Museum of Photography, New England School of Photography and Doton Saguy’s Street Photography Masterclass has enriched her practice, as has mentorship with artist and curator, Emily Belz. Bennett has a M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary, NYC, and academic credentials and professional experience in social services and software engineering. She resides in the greater Boston area.

Diana Cheren Nygren

Mother Earth 

Nevertheless she persisted.

A city girl and skeptic to my core, I feel an overwhelming sense of awe in the face of a desert spread before me or the expanse of the ocean. Within these magnificent landscapes, humanity seems small and insignificant. Geologic eras are etched into layers of rock and our time on earth seems short in contrast. So far there have been thirty-seven epochs in the history of this planet. Humans have been on Earth for less than two of these, though our impact on the shape of the planet has been tremendously outsized. What will the next epoch look like? 

I have mounted scenes of human habitation behind acrylic, plastic walls that we imagine can safely separate the things we do from having an impact on the natural world. I have then affixed these scenes onto and within sweeping landscapes. I am presenting this work without glass. The constructed world behind the acrylic is literally protected, while the landscapes remain exposed and vulnerable. A continuity of line and color between these two parts of the work hints at their interconnectedness. I use the desert southwest of the United States as a stand-in for what the majority of the land on our planet might look like as it continues to be shaped by rising temperatures, drought, and fires. Ultimately, I present these multi-layered images in hand-painted wooden frames, alluding to the next chapter in the planet’s history. As the image pushes beyond its edges, the story continues to evolve. 

In spite of human activity, the Earth continues to transform and reinvent itself. The Earth is not coming to an end. Its inhabitants cannot escape its permanence, and the power it has to shape their existence. The question remains, as nature reinvents itself, can we adapt with it? Will we be part of that next chapter?

About

Diana Cheren Nygren is a photography based artist. Her work explores the relationship of people to the physical environment, and landscape as a setting for human activity. Diana obtained a B.A. in Fine Arts from Harvard University and a M.A. in Art History from UC Berkeley. Her training as an art historian focussed on modern art, and the relationship of artistic production to its socio-political context. Her work as a photographer is the culmination of a life-long investment in the power of art and visual culture to shape and influence social change, addressing serious questions through a blend of documentary practice, invention, and humor. Her work has exhibited around the globe and has won numerous awards including TIFA Discovery of the Year, PX3 Best New Talent, and LICC Best in Shoot.

Frank Curran

Portals

As a street photographer, I often include people in my images of the urban environment. But when I unintentionally began this on-going project, in early 2020, the streets were empty. 

In a fortuitous way, this condition forced me to look elsewhere – within windows, storefronts, and at reflections. I discovered that windows can become portals to new worlds. Worlds not bound by narrative or literal constraints as expressed in traditional street photography, but a space where imagination can roam and meaning is ambiguous, subjective or entirely elusive. Some might call it surreal.

About

A graduate of Hunter College and Boston University, early in Frank’s career he studied creative photography with Carl Chiarenza, Stephan Gersh and Chris Enos. He has continued his studies by taking workshops with Emily Belz and Vaughn Sills at the Griffin Museum of Photography.

An assignment photographer for more than 40 years, Frank’s personal photography has begun to take its place alongside his commercial work.

Frank has exhibited work in two person shows at the Trident Bookseller Café on Newbury Street in Boston, and The Brookline Public Library and has appeared in group shows at the Davis/Orton Gallery in Hudson, NY, the A Smith Gallery in Johnson City TX, the Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts, the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA, the Bromfield Gallery in Boston, the Black Box Gallery in Portland OR, the Praxis Gallery in Minneapolis and a Juror’s Choice Award for his image, “Strolling Through the Light Industrial Zone” from the Southeast Center of Photography in Greenville, SC.

Nancy A. Nichols

Photography in the Age of Digital Reproduction

This is a photography project about photography; about the challenge of making pictures in a society awash in images.

Frustrated and overwhelmed by the sheer number of photos I encountered each day, I yearned to make truly unique images.  For this project, I photographed common household items up close to make them look larger than life, printed them digitally and then hand colored them with pastels and pencils. My goal was to make one-of-a-kind pieces of art out of mass-produced consumer objects—many of which are iconic in their own right.

My work was heavily influenced by an essay written almost 100 years ago entitled The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In this classic 1936 article philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, clearly saw and carefully detailed the dangers that modern printing and photographic processes posed for artists as they began to struggle with something new to them—the near constant reproduction of images of all kinds. Benjamin argued forcefully that something is lost when a handmade piece of art is reproduced by a printing press. He thought that the very act of reproduction reduced the specialness or “aura” of an object. 

To introduce Benjamin’s ideas to a contemporary audience, I asked ChatGPT, an AI chatbot, to elucidate and comment on his article.  A screen recording of that conversation plays continuously on an iPad near the photographs I made—including AI generated advice for restoring the authentic “aura” of an art object. These bot-generated tips stand next to my own efforts to create something unique out of something commonplace; my own effort to make art amidst the constant creation and replication of images and the tsunami of artificiality we all experience every day.

About

Nancy A. Nichols is a photographer, writer, and editor.  She holds an MFA in photography from New England College (2020) and has held editorial positions at The Harvard Business Review and The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour. A Critical Mass top 200 photographer, her work has been featured in shows at the Griffin Museum, A. Smith Gallery, and PhotoPlace Gallery.  She is the author of Lake Effect: Two Sisters and a Town’s Toxic Legacy—a book on the environmental causes of illness. Her next book, Women Behind the Wheel, a history of women and cars, will be published by Pegasus Books in March 2024.

Becky Behar

Tu Que Bivas

Tu Que Bivas is part of a Sephardic blessing my parents often invoked: “May you live, grow, and thrive like a little fish in freshwater.” I am a Sephardic Jew, part of the diasporic population expelled from Spain during the Inquisition in the late 15th century. My family’s migrations have taken us from Turkey to Colombia to the United States. Throughout, we have maintained our Ladino language, Jewish religion, and Sephardic customs.

My photographs explore how my mother and daughter continue to enact these traditions and rituals today. As I contemplate their different ways of preserving and celebrating our history, I consider my own relationship to this heritage and what interpretations my daughter will carry forward.

About

Becky Behar is a photo-based artist born in Colombia and now living in the suburbs of Boston. Her richly choreographed portraits and still lifes investigate motherhood, the passage of time, and what we carry through generations. Behar began photographing her three children as they matured into adults. Her compositions reflect embellished autobiographical and fictional narratives about their transition to adulthood and Behar’s shifting maternal identity as her children left home. With incandescent subject matter emerging from rich shadows, her photographs evoke Dutch oil paintings, replete with symbols of transience, family, and faith. Behar punctuates portraits with still lifes that mark the present-day, rendering plastic bags luminous amongst cherries and figs. Here, home is an idea, not a place.

Behar has exhibited at national and international galleries including solo exhibitions with Kniznick Gallery (Waltham, MA), The Griffin Museum of Photography (Winchester, MA), Workspace Gallery (Lincoln, NE) and at Concord Free Public Library (Concord, MA) where she was an Artist in Residence. This experience allowed her to tailor the exhibit to the venue and teach photography workshops for young adults. Her group exhibitions include the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts (Providence, RI), Photographic Resource Center (Cambridge, MA), Woodmere Museum (Philadelphia, PA), and FotoNostrum Gallery (Barcelona, Spain). Behar’s work has been featured in A Photo Editor, Float Photo Magazine, Fraction Magazine, The Boston Globe, Jewish Boston and What Will You Remember?.

Behar has received multiple acknowledgements for her work including being a Photolucida Critical Mass top 200 finalist (2020), a finalist for the Griffin Museum of Photography John Chervinsky Emerging Photographer Scholarship (2020), and was an awardee with the 16th Annual Julia Margaret Cameron Award for Women Photographers (2021). Behar’s most recent honors include a Concord Cultural Council Grant (2022), and a Combined Jewish Philanthropies Grant (2023). This Fall, she will become a Visiting Scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center where she will continue to research and develop her photography portfolios. 

Linda Wolk

Juxtapositions

Noun

jux· ta· po· si· tion, ˌjək-stə-pə-ˈzi-shən 

the act or an instance of placing two or more things side by side often to compare or contrast or to create an interesting effect               (merriam-webster.com)

Long looking yields great rewards. It’s like an onion — start with the whole and then peel back to reveal each layer and discover the details. Some are beautiful and some not so pretty but all are interesting.

Flowers are a favorite subject of mine; they are very cooperative models. I photograph them over days and marvel at their beauty and complexity while watching them mature and fade. While creating these images I remembered photographs in my archives. I was inspired to make connections between my current and past work based on shape, color or mood. Take a closer look. What connections do you see? 

About

Linda Wolk is a photographer in the Boston area who takes pleasure in making images that document the world she lives in and how she sees it. She records her family, everyday observances, her love of travel, and the details of her environment with her camera.

Wolk was born and raised in New Jersey but has spent her adult life in the Boston area. A graduate with BS and MA degrees from Boston University and Columbia University she spent time teaching in elementary school classrooms guiding the minds and eyes of her students. For 20+ years she was a member of the MFA Boston’s Department of Education serving as a Gallery Instructor taking students from grades 1 – 12 through the galleries and introducing them to art and the art of looking. Always interested in visual arts but discouraged by art instructors Wolk began studying photography at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA as an adult and discovered that she could make art! She has continued taking classes and workshops in the greater Boston area including ones offered at the Radcliffe Seminars, the Griffin Museum of Photography and the Arlington Center of the Arts as well as workshops given in Costa Rica, Cuba, Iceland and many places in the United States. Currently she is enrolled in the Atelier 37 class offered at the Griffin. Her work has been exhibited at the DeCordova Museum, the Leventhal-Sidman JCC, Lexington’s Cary Memorial Library, the Bedford Public Library and the Lexington Community Center.