Michael King

Flight From Abstraction

In the early 20th century, the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) painted his seminal work, The Black Square. This painting launched the abstract art movement in which representational forms from the natural world, such as birds, were deliberately obscured from view.   Strolling through modern art galleries I have tried to imagine how the paintings would change if the “birds” were able to reappear from their captivity. In this series, I utilize photomontage to explore the narrow boundary where reality and imagination intersect and birds can escape the rigid confines of abstract painting. 

I have always enjoyed bird photography. Through the years I have taken thousands of avian photographs. Most of the birds in this series, with a few noted exceptions, originated from my own collection where, for years, they have been patiently waiting to join a photography project like this one.

About

Michael King is a Massachusetts based photographer.  He is a retired physicist who worked in diverse fields of optical imaging. King has achievements and inventions in 3-dimensional holographic imaging, electron device photolithography and refractive eye surgery (PRK). A lifelong interest in photographic expression has led him to his present pursuit, using digital photography to explore the intersection between real and imagined realities.

King has exhibited his photos in group and juried exhibitions at venues including the Griffin Museum of Photography (Winchester, MA) the Concord Art Association (Concord, MA), PhotoPlace Gallery (Middlebury, VT), and the Praxis Gallery (Minneapolis, MN). Early in his career he had a hologram accepted into the Museum of Holography in Manhattan which later transferred its collections to the MIT Museum in Boston. 

King has studied photography at the Griffin Museum, NESOP and the deCordova Museum all located in Massachusetts and at Maine Media.  He holds a Ph.D. in physics from Carnegie Mellon University. 

Anthony Attardo

Stories of Quiet Resolve

“Stories offer an outlet for individuals to defy their anonymity, provide solace, and empower

themselves and others.”  — text from a recent Portland Museum of Art exhibit.

These photographs, made at night, explore the quiet resolve and resiliency of the people who live in  small towns across New Hampshire.  

Although there are no people in these photos, nevertheless they contain signs of a calm, steady human presence—footprints on a darkened basketball court, an empty small airport waiting room, two chairs representing the possible remnants of a past conversation.  

Each photo extends an invitation to the viewer to contemplate who might live in these spaces, to feel their presence, and imagine their voices.  Each one is a small part of a larger story. 

As the American novelist John Steinbeck has said: “You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.”  I hope you can feel the people of these small New Hampshire towns in these photos. 

About

Anthony Attardo is a New Hampshire based photographer. He is passionate about using his camera to illustrate the essence of the day to day found in small urban and rural spaces, and as a means to bring people together.

From an early age, the conversation at the Attardo family dinner table wasn’t about food, it was treating people with dignity and respect no matter where they were in life, what they looked like, or where they came from. Today, this powerful lesson is the driving force of Attardo’s photography. His photographs tell stories from a personal perspective, and his images reveal a belief that respect and humility are the greatest common denominators. 

Attardo’s photographs have been exhibited at the Vermont Center for Photography in Brattleboro, VT, the Kimball Jenkins School of Art in Concord, NH, and the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA. He has studied at the New England School of Photography, the New Hampshire Institute of Art, and the Photography Atelier at the Griffin Museum of Photography. 

He is inspired by Alan Cohen’s words, “Do not wait until conditions are perfect to begin. Beginning makes conditions perfect.”

Betsy Banks

Tangled In Decision

I struggle when making life decisions that require commitment and a leap into the unknown.  Blocked by a tangle of confusion and a fog of uncertainty, I analyze multiple options and uncover risks in each possibility. I never choose one. Instead, I freeze – stuck in the fear of being trapped in a wrong decision.

A couple of looming crossroads recently re-surfaced this clenched place of fragmented and repetitive thinking. I wanted to explore this response to indecision in hopes of loosening its grip. Feeling grounded in nature, I went searching for symbols of my inner world. 

The work that emerged is laced with a sense of loss from decisions made by me not making them. Leaps never taken. How many parallel lives evaporated while I stood still, waiting for the guaranteed right choice to somehow appear? Through this project, I’ve grown to understand more deeply that staying cautiously stuck in my mind doesn’t keep me safe. The risk is not stepping into the unknown; the risk is staying frozen while the opportunity disappears forever. The inherent complexity of the natural world reminds me that I am part of a much larger story – one that rarely reveals itself with clarity. It is the leap that moves the story forward.

About

Betsy Banks is an educator and photographer whose work explores place and connection to the natural world. She often uses multiples to investigate and reveal pattern, transformation, and association. Intrigued by the relationship between people and place, Betsy studied anthropology and environmental science (BA Bowdoin College/MS Miami University) and has focused her career on experiential education, conservation, and community engagement – interests which also inform her photography. Currently located in northeast Ohio, Betsy works at a university civic engagement center, coordinating educational programs that connect college students and the Cleveland community. To share her love of photography, Betsy serves on the steering committee of an organization that promotes photographic arts in Cuyahoga Valley National Park and works as a teaching assistant for Doug Johnson Photography Workshops, exploring beautiful, wild places through photography.

David Brown

Beloved

I first became interested in in my project topic after a group I was traveling with happened upon a rural cemetery.  It seemed extremely well-kept for such a remote location, with an eclectic assortment of colorful and ornate tombstones, memorials, and simple markers.  Plots were covered in flowers, stones in various patterns, flags and medallions, and small ceramic figurines.  Effort went into these publicly held private conversations with the dead, rooted in a mixture of tradition and personalization.  I decided to dive a bit deeper when I got home.

The months preceding my trip had been filled with unexpected loss.  Several childhood friends and a nephew died.  I observed other exchanges with departed friends and family and thought about my own conversations with the dead.  Was I remembering them the way they would have hoped.  How would I be remembered?

The things that are left when others pay a visit to those who have passed on.  These artifacts symbolize a deeply personal and thoughtful ritual that speaks to the connection between we the living and our dearly departed friends and family … and perhaps something more.

About

Dave Brown is a free-lance photographer based in Dover, MA.  A native of Newburyport, MA, he has lived and traveled the globe courtesy of military service and a technology consulting career.  This has afforded Dave the opportunity to photograph a variety of people and places.  

Dave runs a veteran-owned business that uses digital and drone technology.  He photographs landscapes, gatherings, celebrations, and sporting events.  Through his work Dave seeks connections that will draw the viewer in, combining an interesting subject with the changes offered by varying illumination patterns, settings, and compositions.

Dave is self-taught and continues to evolve his craft through his assignments and encounters.

Chelsea Silbereis

Compassionating – 2023

I love the crush of these children. I’ll just lie on the ground purely for the thrill of feeling them climb me and press me down hard. It feels like full-body contentment, right up until it gets too close. Then it feels like drowning. As a result, I move between availability, aloofness, and irritability even though compassionating continuously is my goal.

Compassionating explores the tension I experience creating a healthy emotional life for my kids over my background of childhood and generational trauma.  I pick up my camera when I’m on the brink of these changeable mood states and I photograph our everyday.

When the emotions get to be too much we turn to the landscape to try and regulate. I see my experience played out in intimate natural scenes: existential dread in the fluff from a milkweed pod, hope in a crisp line of illuminated water along the edge of a late fall berry, the twists and turns of failing and trying again in the gnarls of an old stump.

The resulting series of photographs are built into a handmade book with interactive components that invite the viewer to handle the pages and the photos themselves. The inevitable imprint of their handling feels like my inevitable imprint on my kids; no matter how careful I am, I will leave unintended marks. 

About

Chelsea Silbereis is a photographer exploring themes of family and domestic life, intimacy, and generational trauma living and working near Boston, MA. Chelsea has had a non-traditional photography education including many internet-based photography workshops, having a photographer parent, and self-directed study of 20th-century photographers. 

Her photos have appeared in group exhibitions at The Curated Fridge, PhotoPlace Gallery and she is a current Boston Center for the Arts Resident. 

Chelsea’s commissioned work involves embedding with families to document their real life with an unfiltered and heartfelt lens.

She lives with her husband, 2 kids, a dog and a cat in Belmont, MA and likes to imagine the ghosts of pets past are also members of the household. 

Jena Love

The Unsolvable Conspiracy of Life

The Unsolvable Conspiracy of Life is an exploration of internal dialogues, and the complexities, vulnerabilities, and contradictions found within. Through this deeply personal work, I expose unspeakable fears, the embarrassing, and sometimes damaging thoughts that consume me, and the unanswerable questions that inhabit my brain. By making visible the inner workings and tangled tapestries of my own mind – the neurodivergent mind of a working parent of three young children – I present a case study for the intricate neural patterns and pathways that knit together the landscapes of an individual’s thoughts. Though based on my own viewpoint, this work articulates a more universal experience of the weight and responsibility of life and parenthood – of living lives that are not solely our own.

Using the visual languages of documentary photography and candid snapshots, I create a pictorial framework, reminiscent of a detective’s evidence board, within which I trace the interconnected webbing of both dominant and minor thought processes. Referencing the sporadic, non-linear nature of inner dialogues, the multiple branches of imagery are punctuated with poly bags containing collected samples, found artifacts and fragments of handwritten text containing specific questions, thoughts, and fears and. The installation, set on a recreation of a wall in my home, expresses the unexpected humor and absurdity we face when balancing the complexities of self with the constant, often overwhelming, responsibilities of domestic and professional life.

About

Jena Love is an artist and educator who lives and works in Sullivan County, NY. Though her background is in drawing and painting, she is currently focused on expanding her body of conceptual photography work. In her art, Love explores the complexities, ironies, challenges, humor, and beauty of motherhood. A mother of three, Love often captures herself and her family as the primary models for her images, set within the context of domestic spaces. She uses elements of documentary and typological photography, along with aspects of surrealism and farce to craft images that critically engage with the quotidian nature of family life, finding humor in the mundane. Though approached through the lens of a personal narrative, Love’s art speaks more broadly to the universal and shared experiences of mothers, parents, and children, particularly as situated within an American consumerist culture. Her work has been exhibited in various exhibitions virtually, within the United States as well as internationally. Her work has been featured in numerous publications such as LENSCRATCH, Feature Shoot, and F-stop magazine. She was named one of the 100 female photographers to watch in 2021 by Click Magazine and included in Photolucida’s Critical Mass top 50 of 2022

Judith Donath

An Inoculation of Solitude

A solitude arises, paradoxically, in densely populated urban spaces, a response to the anonymity of crowds and to the innumerable fleeting encounters with passing strangers, their faces glimpsed and soon forgotten. Such solitude can slip into loneliness, when the city’s chatter and bustling clamor start to sound like chants mocking one’s stark and inescapable aloneness. Yet solitude-amidst-millions can also be freeing, an escape from family ties and community eyes. The ability to carve out solitary moments, even just a few seconds or simply in a corner of one’s mind, is essential when living among so many others; the early 20th century sociologist Louis Wirth noted: “The reserve, the indifference, and the blasé outlook which urbanites manifest…[are] devices for immunizing themselves against the personal claims and expectations of others”.
Solitudes evolve. When the coronavirus epidemic descended, crowd became synonymous with contagion, seclusion with safety, and the technologies that connect us became another paradoxical source of solitude, enabling us to live with relative ease in extended isolation. Post-pandemic, elements of this disconnection linger: commuters trickle into echoing lobbies where banks of elevators wait expectantly for the waves of workers who still have not returned.
These photographs are a meditation on the varieties of urban solitude.

About

Judith Donath is a photographer whose work focuses on people—on their relationships with each other and on their interactions with technological, architectural and natural environments. Her photographic work is grounded in the traditions of street photography, but she also embraces experimental processes and presentations. Donath is a well-known new media designer and theorist, and her experience with computational technologies and insights about our rapidly changing world inform her image-making practice.

Donald P. Johnson

Things, Shed…
Most days I take a walk. My goal is always the same no matter the location, time of day, or season: walk, contemplate, notice. As I walk I look for interesting objects. Things lost, abandoned, or forgotten; the whimsical, the unusual or the mundane. Nature and humans both continually shed into our environment. Nature continues the cycle of creation, life, death, and renewal. We humans, however, have a different way of leaving things behind. Our discarding can be accidental, careless, willful, or malevolent. At its worst, what we cast off has permanence. At a minimum these discarded objects mar everyone else’s experience.

Things, Shed… shows the contrast between the organic cycle of nature versus the durability of human-discarded objects. Sadly, over time many of our abandoned things begin to look like they actually belong. I don’t expect this work to solve the on-going ecological disaster caused by humans. Rather, I hope these images will invite reflection on the question: “Can we do better?”

About

Donald P. Johnson is a photographer and technologist currently living in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Raised in upstate New York, he spent many years living in New York City and has since relocated to the south coast of New England. He holds a BS in Math/Computer Science and an MFA in Theatre Light Design. Donald worked in theater for a decade before transitioning to the technology sector. Photography was initially a means of documenting his theatre designs, but he has since made it the focus of his artistic practice. Donald mainly photographs intimate landscapes, urban scapes, sea scapes, and the convergence of people and nature. He hikes to photograph and photographs to hike.

Jami Goodman

A Joy to be Hidden, A Disaster not to be Found

For as long as I can remember, I’ve stayed in the background shadows, having internalized confusing messages I’d heard as a child. Now I have children of my own. I’ve spent the last 17 years raising them with intention, trying desperately to recognize and honor the sound of my own voice, and theirs.

As a meditation and ongoing effort to notice my voice, I take pictures of flowers, seeing myself in their form, especially as they age. In the spirit of wanting to widen my scope but not having a clear goal in mind, I set about taking more photos, allowing the camera to lead the way. Examining the work as it emerged I noticed I was documenting what’s left of my daughters’ childhoods as the clock quickly ticks down to college. I saw my sadness, fear, and grief as I prepare to let go of our fairyland and hurtle toward the next stage of life where our tight-knit happy family no longer lives together full-time. But as I continued the work, something else emerged. I suddenly realized that my penchant for dark backgrounds, shadows, single subjects, and blur are like the flowers; substitutes for myself, revealing personality traits and even some secrets I’m still not quite ready to share. The photos in this series depict time spent with my children, but making these photos actually set about the unintended work of pulling myself out from the shadows, letting go of beliefs and behaviors that no longer work in my service, and exploring what it might be like to tiptoe out of the dark and into the light. The process has been burdensome, aggravating my lifelong battle between taking cover in the comfort and safety of invisibility, and the human need to be seen and heard; accepted as-is. Using aesthetic elements and photographic techniques as metaphor, this work begins my journey into the light. Indeed, there is risk to being noticed, but there is even greater risk to a life being left unfound, in the dark.

About

Jami Goodman is fine art photographer living in New Hampshire. Raised in Massachusetts, she earned her BS in Communicative Disorders at the University of
Rhode Island. She went on to Northeastern University where she received her MS in Applied Educational Psychology and CAGS in School Psychology. Jami worked as a school psychologist in New Hampshire for over a decade before deciding that she wanted to raise her young family full time. When time allowed, she took adult education classes in drawing, watercolor, and photography, and found the most joy in photographing flowers. A family crisis in 2019 brought life to a standstill, but Jami picked up her camera again when the pandemic hit in 2020. Photography has been a form of meditation and a way to find peace and creativity while living within the unknown.

Laura Ferraguto

The Peace of Wild Things

When I was five, my family moved to a home surrounded by woodlands. I remember this place as something out of a fairytale. An abundance of native plants and wildlife flourished there. Until my younger sister was old enough to join me, I explored the woods alone. I created an imaginary world, where each tree and patch of wildflowers became my friend. Although that world faded as I grew older, a reverence for the land was deeply instilled in me. As a true introvert, I’m guided by a need for solitude, but there can be a fine line between solitude and isolation. My need for quiet and private space can lead to disconnection and loneliness. I retreat to the natural world as a source of healing. Walking repeatedly near my home, I investigate small details in the landscape. Close observation provides a sense of hope and of belonging to something greater than myself. The image making process becomes an attempt to immerse myself in the peace and transcendence of these moments.

About

Laura Ferraguto is a visual artist working in digital photography and alternative processes. Her work explores the natural environs of her native New England, and themes of solitude and reverence for the earth. Her images investigate details of the landscape that come from suspended time and close observation.

She holds a B.A. from Boston College in Studio Art, focused on painting. For over 25 years she has worked in sectors of the book industry, including trade publishing and copyright licensing. Ferraguto’s work has been featured in groups shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography (Winchester, MA); PhotoPlace Gallery (Middlebury, VT); Boston Nature Center; the Wellesley Free Library (Wellesley, MA); a public art installation at Fan Pier (Boston, MA); and has been
published by Mass Audubon.

Born and raised in Connecticut, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.