Subject: From Pixiport Fine Art Photography
 |
The Pixiporter
Mid Month News |
August 2007 - Vol 9, Issue 15
| |
|
|
In This Issue |
|
|
|
|
Quick Links |
|
|
| |
|
|
Dear PixiPort, |
|
|
"Art serves as therapy, gives meaning to life, gives unselfconscious experience, provides paradigms of order and/or disorder, and trains perception of reality. "
Ellen Dissanayake |
|
|
|
|
Gerald Parker is a Boston M.F.A. graduate, and a N.E.A. recipient. His work has been seen in one man shows and housed in private collections through out the country.
He has been photographing for twenty five years. Mr. Parker's photography emerges as a unique combination of artistic influences and the basic tenets of documentary and reform photography.
Brockton, Massachusetts was a city on the rebound in the 1950s. A major interstate highway had just been completed, and people were moving to the area in record numbers. A viable, productive shoe industry in the city employed nearly 9,500 workers. Downtown Brockton was a bustling center of retail businesses. The city looked to the future with great expectations, because it had endured rapid contraction of industry following the end of World War II, and had thus far avoided the wholesale flight of industry that plagued other New England industrial centers.
Although Brockton was not the powerhouse of shoe production it once was, the city was able to retain a vital core of the industry that had supported it for so long, unlike textile cities Lowell and Fall River, Massachusetts. In the late 1940s and 1950s, many industries completely abandoned New England, fueled by a wave of mergers and the availability of cheap, non-unionized labor and less expensive plant and facilities in the South and overseas ("off-shore" locations). In most cases, the departure of industry left behind large, idle factories, and depressed cities and towns with soaring unemployment rolls. In the 1950s, it looked as though Brockton had staved off the inevitable; the city's tenure as an industrial center outstripped many of its New England counterparts. Unfortunately, it was only a matter of time before Brockton would join the ranks of dilapidated former industrial cities throughout the Northeast.
The 1950s were a good time to be a child in the city of Brockton. Gerald "Jerry" Parker, whose photographs are the subject of this paper, was born in Brockton in 1949. He spent his childhood and early adult years in the city, attending its schools, playing on any one of its "million playgrounds," roaming its streets, and developing a love for his home. Parker's youthful images were vitally important to him because in the 1970s, when Parker returned home to Brockton, he found the place he knew all but vanished. Gone were the crowded neighborhoods and busy shops; in their stead were badly maintained homes and boarded up storefronts. No longer was the downtown area vibrant and full of life. It was dilapidated. It was depressed.
In the 1970s, Parker was a student at the Museum of Fine arts school in Boston. Here he experimented with many different artistic mediums, among them photography. Parker studied many different photographers and their techniques, which illustrated the capabilities of the camera, suggested many different ideas for photographic subjects, and gave him a variety of ways of looking at Brockton. After coming home in the 1970s he realized he saw the city through different eyes; he suddenly understood that the place he knew as a boy was disappearing. Not long after he returned, he decided to begin a project to document what was left of his childhood home through a series of photographs.
Parker began shooting in 1974 and continued until the early 1980s. There are over a thousand negatives and three hundred prints from the project. The images he captured, though intended for documentary purposes, did what he initially intended them to do - catalogue an inventory of the architecture of downtown Brockton. What also emerges in these "documentary" photographs is a narrative of reminiscence. Parker photographed scenes that affected him. He was moved by a sense that the Brockton he knew was in danger of disappearing, and his photographs expressed his emotional responses to his memories and sense of loss - joy and despair, compassion and callousness, lucidity and madness, pride and shame. All of these responses shine through in Parker's Brockton photographs. The narrative created by Parker's photographs effectively captured the physical decay of the city, displayed the social, economic, and human costs of deindustrialization, and testified as to what he valued in the Brockton he had known.
Parker's intention was to use photographs taken in the 1970s and early 1980s to convey the past. This interest helps to explain the absence of young and middle-aged people in many of the compositions. Another absence is the factory work process itself. Parker never went into the factories, within his family only his deceased grandfather had ever worked there. But the factories were at the heart of Brockton's social and economic fabric. In the 1970s Brockton photographs, Parker conveyed working people alternately through the construction, retail, and food service jobs that employed them in the post-mill period.
These photographs, important for far more than their subject matter, represent Parker's attempt to reconcile the changes in the city, as well as to capture the essence of what remained of the home he once knew. Some images were composed strictly for their documentary qualities, while others were taken of people that the photographer was familiar with or simply found interesting.
Several elements must be understood in order to properly read Parker's Brockton photographs. Artistic influences had a profound effect on Parker, and he appropriated elements from a wide variety sources to create his hybrid style. In the Brockton photographs, Parker utilized a concept he refers to as the "building" of the compositions, as well as techniques normally used in other mediums, such as painting and drawing. The result of Parker's approach is a unique combination of documentary and contemporary reform photography.
This paper demonstrates how a careful reading of Parker's photos from the 1970s and 1980s can help us interpret Brockton's history, the disappearing Brockton of Parker's youth. The photographs from the 1970s, and the subjects, forgotten even as they lived, have only slipped further into obscurity as time has passed. I intend to shed light on the motivation behind the Brockton project, briefly analyze and explore the content of the images, investigate their location in photographic history, and provide the historical and social contexts in which they were taken.
Brocktonians were, and are, proud of their city. While researching this project I discovered that without exception, residents of the Brockton area either past or present have a passion for their home. What we see in the photographs that follow is one photographer's attempt to define that love and create a narrative revealing the streets of his youth.
| |
|
|
|
|
Steve Bingham's interest in photography began at the tender age of eleven when he discovered the magic of developing film under the glow of a dim red bulb in his mother's kitchen. He won his first photography contest while still in high school and eventually went on to get a Masters Degree in Photography from the Brooks Institute of Photography. For the next 30 years he taught photography at the secondary and college level and managed his commercial photography business, West Coast Images.
Although Mr. Bingham's work has been published in dozens of national magazines (such as Popular Photography, Petersen's Photographic, Trailer Life, First, Arizona Highways, Golfer's Digest, Trains, etc) his real interest lies in the fine art aspect of manipulating digital images. His first digital work was published 1994 in Popular Photography in an article titled "Digital Photography Comes of Age". Since then he has continued to push the envelope into new and exciting areas. His current work can be seen in several Arizona art galleries as well as his web site.
|
|
|
|
|
ElleVuPi is fundamentally known as a photographer. For some time now, though, he's been finding photography too tight, and so, searching for new expressivenesses, he tries to cheat by going under a different appearance. In this search not of the new, but at least of the different, of the uncommon, to amaze rather than to be admired, photographer ElleVuPi uses, for this new artistic enterprise, various instruments and materials other than the camera. He presents himself as an artist willing to change.
Now he creates his images at the board under the banner of color and fantasy. ElleVuPi, approaching other expressive means, does not shoot any more and does not even paint (couldn't do it) but, to create images, he uses paste, brushes, watercolors. ElleVuPi "discovers" and utilizes the potentialities of COLLAGE. ElleVuPi builds his pictures working on cuttings of figures, of people, of landscapes and of architectures coming from photos or from reproductions of works by great masters of classic and contemporary painting.
The whole is composed starting with the organic union of fragments of images of diverse natures, antagonizing one another, which, deprived of their every former reference, are assembled in a final "mise-en-scène" so to try making them assume a new aestethical valency.
The certain mark of the photographic image or of a pictorial reproduction shatters under the scissor's work and then the uncertain outlines of the cuttings blend together in a fanciful path, they join to yield matches impossible in reality but possible, for example, in fantasy or in dreams.
Between certain and uncertain there is an illusory possible.
The pictures' leit-motiv is the representation of the female figure, subject ever changing in its appearance. Male figures appear very rarely. Sometimes children, angel and saints enter the stage. Sometimes the pictures, even though comprehensible, have hidden references and meanings.
ElleVuPi is often asked: "What does this mean?" and the answer is always the same: "I don't know, what do you see in it?".
For his cultural references, ElleVuPi makes use of painting models of Classic art, of Surrealism, of Pop- Art, of German Expressionism. He equally loves Rinascimental and Baroque art and authors like Leger, Mondrian, Magritte, Otto Dix, Vasily Kandinskij, Max Ernst, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, Alex Katz, Antonio Donghi, Carlo Carrà, Savinio, Picasso, H.M. Davringhausen and Tamara de Lempicka.
You can contact ElleVuPi, i.e. Lucio Valerio Pini, at ellevupi@tiscalinet.it
|
|
|
|
|
|
Call to Artists - Embracing Our Differences Description ........: Embracing Our Differences invites artists, photographers, professionals, amateurs, teachers and students to participate in its 5th annual visual art exhibit celebrating diversity. National and international submissions are encouraged. 39 artists will be selected for the exhibit. The Embracing Our Differences exhibit will be displayed throughout the month of April 2008 at Island Park along Sarasota's beautiful bayfront. The exhibit will also be displayed throughout the month of May 2008 in North Port, Florida. Since 2004, the exhibit has been viewed by more than 400,000 visitors. The exhibit will contain 39 billboard-sized (16 feet wide by 12 1/2 feet high) images of the selected artworks.
Final selections will be chosen based on artistic excellence in reflection of the theme "Embracing Our Differences". The art-work will also be evaluated on how effectively it will read outdoors when enlarged to billboard size - 16 feet wide by 12 1/2 feet high. Artists are encouraged to use bold saturated colors and strong lines. Final selections will be made by a 3- judge panel of professional artists, curators and art professionals. A total of $2,500.00 in awards will be presented.
.
Deadline for submission is January 8, 2008.
The mission of Embracing Our Differences is to use art as a catalyst for creating awareness and promoting the value of diversity, the benefits of inclusion and the significance of the active rejection of hatred and prejudice.
|
|
|
|
|
Enjoy The Journey!
Sincerely,
Helyn Of Pixiport
Pixiport Fine Art Photography
|
|
Pixiport Fine Art Photography | 4651 31st Ave N | Saint Petersburg | FL | 33713 | |
|
