VoxPhotographs Weblog

If you stopped in to Domaine Gallery on Commercial St. in Portland any time during the three years before it closed in December/08, you will remember Stacey Cramp’s square format color Maine landscapes.

Blueberry Field, Winter © Stacey Cramp

Although I saw them every time I went in the gallery, every time they took me a bit by surprise. I’m definitely partial to square format framing, but I really liked the way Cramp continued to divide up many of the images into three or four distinct horizontal sections. I found I saw more in the images each time I studied them.

Seawall Beach Sand © Stacey Cramp

I also found that many of the images crossed over from satisfying Maine landscapes, easily read and appreciated, to something much more abstract. Step back, or stick your nose right up to the prints – there was always a freshness about them.

If you go on to Stacey’s website you’ll see she’s been busy. Most recently she did the cover shot for Jan/Feb PortCityLife magazine.

I also got an e-mail notice recently that she has moved into a shared studio space at 82 Gilman St. and that there is an Open House coming up soon – Feb. 19, 6-8. It’s under the auspices of AIGA.

Stacey published a popular calendar for 2009 and it continues to prove the breadth of her work and interests.

Okay, it all makes sense so far, right?

But Stacey Cramp has a secret. And it’s a monochromatic one.

She has a portfolio of about a dozen heartstopping black and white square format landscapes taken with her Hasselblad, many of which she took using a pinhole lens cover.They are traditional dark room prints, many selenium toned, giving off a soft violet hue. When she asked me to look at the images at the end of a photo review session at the gallery recently, I was happy to comply.

I had no idea I would be stepping through the Wardrobe.

When I opened the portfolio, my immediate world changed. These were gorgeous images that gave me that rare experience of losing myself in them and tuning out everything else. They  filled my senses entirely, leaving no room for any other stimulus.

Special Road © Stacey Cramp

The best photographs speak for themselves and these don’t need any words from me to enhance their value to the viewer, that’s for sure.

Morse Mountain Tree © Stacey Cramp

Fisherman’s Point, Dawn © Stacey Cramp

No, this secret can shout all on its own just fine.

When I bought a copy of “Portland – Through the Lens” the night of the publishing party last year (or the year before?? – the years are flying by too fast to remember this stuff) I enjoyed it and have it very visible in the gallery. The photographs are good and it’s a very worthy group.

Of all the photographers, I guess Dave Wade’s images stayed with me the longest. I liked his perspectives and the images were obviously the work of a really confident photographer. I was delighted to see his work again at the current Addison Woolley show – “The Urban Eye” – here in Portland and you need to get in there to see especially Wade’s four shots of Commercial St. at night. I love them. Street photography is my thing, so this show is like dessert, I can tell you.

Utopia © Dave Wade, all rights reserved

Wade also is showing some “double exposure” shots of NYC which I liked, but would not have said were from the same photographer. When you cruise through Dave’s website (www.davewadephoto.com) you’ll see that this is one versatile guy who has an eye for just about any kind of image needed and does commercial work as well as his fine art photography. I really, really like his use of color in the Commercial St. shots and the one below of LA.

©Dave Wade, all rights reserved

“Versatile” doesn’t quite cut if for this photographer – he hosts WMPG’s “Juke, Jive and Jazz” each week, and loves and lives his music and poetry as well as his photography careers. He lived in Japan for 12 years before settling in Portland.

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Also in the Urban Eye show is a fabulous photographer by the name of Rene Braun. I loved every one of his photographs which is a rare thing in a show. Each one surprised me and drew me in and I hope to get back to Addison Woolley (before the show ends on August 30) to see the images again. He works from gutsy angles, especially successful in his image titled “Manhattan, New York” (2007) of a couple sharing a smoke in some dubious place that allowed Braun to take full advantage of some great light sources. What a photograph! Many of his photos evoke real tension. He was born in the Czech Republic and now lives in Windham, Maine. Here’s Rene’s website and if you google him, you’ll find some other interesting things!

Orchard Lunch © Jon Edwards, All Rights Reserved

Jon Edwards is an attorney (civil rights and environmental) but is much better known as a photographer. He joins Jack Montgomery, a Portland attorney who shows his provocative portraits at Susan Maasch Fine Art as well as other venues, and Jim Nickelson, a patent attorney and aeronautical engineer based in Camden, whose singular landscape photographs tend to stop viewers in their tracks (Jim is represented by VoxPhotographs and also posts here on technical stuff regularly). I bet there are other attorney/fine art photographer combos in Maine…but I think 2008 is Jon’s year.

Coming on the heels of graduating from the MFA program at Rockport College/Maine Media Workshops, Jon received notice that out of 900 submissions, he was one of six photographers to receive an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer Fellowship Grant. That’s pretty darn impressive!

From, A Way of Being – Communicating © Jon Edwards, All Rights Reserved

His new self-published book A Way of Being won first prize, Book Series, from the Prix de la Photographie Paris; he received an Honorable Mention from the Camera Club of New York (Larry Fink, Juror) and was named a finalist in the London Photographic Association “Let’s Face It 4″ competition. All this I learned from Maine Media Workshop’s photo newsletter (www.theworkshops.com/newsletters/mmw/2008-07-16/index.html), not from Jon himself.

Well, some of this info. is in the bio he sent to me in April, and most of it is on his website, but when we got together at the gallery to look at actual photographs, he never said a word about any of it. In his first book and catalog, Jon Edwards, complete with an introductory essay by Curator-At-Large Bruce Brown, eighteen of Jon’s images are carefully placed in a meaningful sequence. All the images are selenium toned silver gelatin prints.

Jon Edwards is a quiet type of guy. So, get on his website and enjoy the images that are helping him gain an international reputation because you probably won’t hear about these achievements from him.

When Mary Woodman, of Kennebunkport, made the commitment to become a full-time photographer, she went right to the top – she called Paul Caponigro to ask if she could study with him and use him as her mentor. You don’t ask, you don’t get. Mary got. That was 1999.

Mary’s worked hard and in the last couple of years it has paid off with numerous shows and exhibits. Her work has been selected twice (2007 and 2008 ) as a winner of Black & White Magazine’s Single Image Contest. Here is the 2008 winner:

Pear © 2007 Mary Woodman

Woodman sure has some unique digital darkroom techniques. She excels with her flowerspheres – I can’t get enough of them. Floating, but not at all tentative, portraits of individual blooms or a same-flower bunch, these are simply gorgeous images to look at over and over.

Flowersphere #31©Mary Woodman

To see more, visit Woodman’s website. I’ve seen some of her winter images that aren’t yet posted and this is one photographer to watch.

Brenton Hamilton teaches an exhausting nine months in Rockport at the Maine Media Workshops and then spends three summer months in his studio making cyanotypes. He actually exposes these by putting them in his studio window in the sun. He must pray for sunny summers. This is labor-intensive stuff in its truest form and I admire passionate pracitioners of the alternative or historic photographic processes. Consider that most of them are working in Maine in solitude without the camaraderie of others doing the same or similar things. They are really committed.

For instance, Brenton works at night in his studio, re-enacting this 1840’s process and then is dependent on the vagaries of the next several days’ weather to see the outcome of his inspirations. Sun, clouds, the water’s reflection? It all plays a part in the end result. So, you really need to know what you’re doing and that takes years of concentrated effort, trial and error and commitment. See two large Hamilton cyanotypes at the current New Natural History exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art through to May 11. Gorgeous.

Merging © Brenton Hamilton, 2007

David Puntel is an ambrotypist who lives in Casco, Maine. He is featured in the current issue of Black and White Magazine. He is, I think, the only actively exhibiting ambrotypist in the state. It takes David all day to produce an image, and it’s taken him years of work to get to the point where he has more successes than failures. It’s a highly instinctive skill to make an ambrotype, with myriad steps and chemicals involved. David even makes outdoor ambrotypes which is right up there on the Richter scale of insanity. Humidity, temperature, atmosphere, light and even transportation play huge roles in this process and Puntel is an expert at gaging the degree of importance of all of these factors on any given day There are only approximately 200 ambrotypists worldwide, many of whom are Civil War re-enactors, and not fine artists like David Puntel. He is represented by my gallery, VoxPhotographs.

Rhubarb © David Puntel, 2007

And then there is David Wolfe – featured in the upcoming May issue of Maine Home & Design. David Wolfe has spent a lifetime learning how to work with paper – his letterpress studio in Portland is worth a visit just so you can stand at the doorway and gape at the variety of ancient machinery he works on. Wolfe trained as a photographer and making palladium prints is a process he loves. Using a big old large format camera, he gets out into the streets of Portland and makes poetry, no kidding. The first image of his I saw was exhibited at Greenhut Gallery in Portland in 2006 and was a palladium print of Starbucks on Congress St. The tension of the 1880’s process and the iconic symbol of modern American culture is simply delicious to see and there’s no other way to say it if you’re into photography and understand its history. With palladiums, it’s all about midtones and a depth and clarity that often looks 3-dimensional. David Wolfe is represented by my gallery, VoxPhotographs.

Checkmate © David Wolfe, 2007

Street time © David Wolfe, 2007

I can tell you all three of these experts have earned their laurels. These historic processes are painstaking and finicky. Take a course sometime. You’ll find it’s 75% process and 25% photography and if you don’t like that ratio, stick to digital. Plus, it takes from 1-3 days to make these things, so you need patience, commitment and passion to be successful.

Did I mention vision? You need that too.

Leonard Bartel only moved to Maine a couple of years ago and even more interesting he’s been photographing (intensely, he says) for only 5-6 years. He’s starting to make a name for himself (I saw a couple of his images recently at Gallery5 in Lewiston at their GPS show) Leonard sent me a note asking me to take a look and I want to show you a couple from his website (www.bartelphoto.com).

Calligraphy © Leonard Bartel

Flight © Leonard Bartel

Bartel shows a high level of confidence and when I look through his work I have to wonder that he’s a newbie. Some of the images are crossover photographs – equally at home in a fine art photography gallery or sold to a publication commercially. But his Landscapes and Wildlife galleries are definitely in the commercial work category.

I’m really partial to Leonard’s flora, in the “And Other Observances” category on his site. I’ve looked at them several times over the past two weeks and find them fresh and engaging and always pleasantly serendipitous when I get there. For the fine art images, I hope he raises his prices soon.

Welcome, Leonard – to Maine and to the world of photography!

Lynn Karlin, based in Belfast, has made an art out of garden photography. Her third book is being published -Gardens Maine Style, Act II – and will be available in June from Down East Books (www.downeast.com). She has just won her eighth Garden Writers of America Silver Award of Achievement for her images featured in the May/June 2007 issue of Cottage Living magazine. During a recent conversation with Lynn at the gallery in Portland she told me she is running to keep up with her 2008 workload.

For 8 years Lynn and her husband lived next door to Helen and Scott Nearing in Harborside, Maine and their book, Maine – A Year of Country Life documented the four seasons on their farm and was published during that time. They grew organic flowers and vegetables for inns and restaurants in the area.

Since then she has photographed countless gardens as well and is one of the best in the business. Check out more pics at www.lynnkarlinphoto.com.

Images © Lynn Karlin