The most catching detail of the photograph is the farmhouse nestled in a clearing on the hill. The painterly quality of Jim Havard’s image, Shenandoah, is enchanting—emoting a nearly tangible serenity.
In Frame: March 30, 2015
Contrario Collective and the Sum of its Parts
The art world has a reputation of being a competitive place, but often here, in the nation’s capital, we see camaraderie bloom between artists. The new photography group, Contrario Collective, has a mission to unite photographers to inspire each other and create collectively. They opened an exhibit featuring work by their members last Thursday, so I stopped by to see the display and talk to the photographers about what their goal is for the collective.
Victoria Milko says she felt the need to assemble a collective in D.C. that is a “constructive place where a bunch of us can get together, take photos, and critique each other’s work with no pretense of being competitive.” In the art community, she says, “there are two sides to the spectrum: you can share your information and learn from each other or, you can be really competitive and not talk about what you’re doing.” Milko describes her friend, Emma McAlary as easy-going, kind, and creative, making her the perfect partner to help organize a collective. The two women share the same values and ideas about photography today, especially in Washington, D.C. McAlary says, “Victoria and I got together one day and we were just talking about the landscape of the D.C. art scene—photography specifically—and we thought there isn’t quite a place for us. And we want to go against the grain—hence the name—Contrario.” They wanted to enlist more like-minded photographers to create a collective based on what Milko describes as an “idea that isn’t typically found in the photography scene.”
In Frame: March 25, 2015
Tunnel vision: spring flowers await us. Photographer Jill Slater has a great vision, using light and reflection to capture the foreshadowing of what’s to come in Washington.
Review: FotoweekDC Contest Winners
The 7th annual FotoWeekDC photography festival launched Friday at its 2014 headquarters, the Former Spanish Ambassador’s Residence. The impressive house had a moderate crowd, deafening music, women handing out long-stem red roses—that soon littered radiators and the floor—and kaleidoscoping lights (you probably saw them all over Instagram).
The launch party featured a few formal exhibitions, along with the winners of their annual contest. FotoWeek has often relegated the contest and local content to an afterthought, so it’s not too much of a surprise to find the contest winners exhibited as such. The images were small and poorly printed, pasted onto black foam core and arranged in a grid. The elementary presentation gave the impression that they ran out of time to finish the installation. (Needless to say, they certainly weren’t meant to be seen during the party under dim colored strobe lights; the other exhibits stayed under gallery lighting.)
Some Uses of Photography @ Katzen Arts Center
Some Uses of Photography: Four Washington Artists at American University’s Katzen Arts Center is a unique kind of photography show. In a dark room tucked away on the third level is an intriguing exploration of how photography is used to make art. I was delighted to see that Phyllis Rosenzweig, a former curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, organized the exhibition—she was, big disclaimer, one of my thesis advisors, so I asked to interview her about the exhibition and how it serves to change the dialogue of cataloguing photography in contemporary art.