This is a pinhole image using a paper negative. It was just selected into the Texas Photographic Society's "The Alternative Processes Competition", juried by Christopher James.
About the Juror
Christopher James, author, artist, photographer, University Professor and Director of the MFA Photography Program at Lesley University College of Art and Design, Cambridge, MA
Christopher James is an internationally known artist and photographer whose photographs, paintings, and alternative process printmaking have been exhibited in galleries and museums in this country and abroad. His work has been published and shown extensively, including exhibitions in The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The George Eastman House, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The first two editions of his book, "The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes" have received international critical acclaim and are universally recognized by artists, curators, historians, and educators as the definitive texts in the genre of alternative process photography and photographically integrated media and culture. A significantly expanded 850 page / 700 image, 3rd edition will be published in late 2014. Christopher, after 13 years at Harvard University, is presently University Professor and Director of the MFA in Photography program at Lesley University College of Art and Designs. He is also a painter, graphic designer, and a professional scuba diver. For more information, please visit www.christopherjames-studio.com.
Juror's Statement
From its inception, individual creativity and inspiration has prevented photography from being a single, identifiable, technology or process. Throughout its evolution, photography has been a slowly moving glacier of adaptation and obsolescence followed closely by a similar transformation influenced by the heat of science, society, technology, aesthetics, and cultural. I think of these influences and processes as I do the boulders in the woods near my studio… evidence of a glacier’s melting. Each overlapping transformation, such as our current analog/digital event, has ushered in an ever-greater democratization of photographic image making, adoption, and adaptation and each of these cycles have been identified by the same family name regardless of how odd the alternative offspring appeared. As well, they have always shared the genus and DNA of photography… that of making marks with light.
I believe the future of photographic, and photographically integrated, image making will find its inspirations and grounding in the syntax and philosophical foundations that embrace the physical act of making art. Contemporary alternative process artists, in the society of the antiquarian avant-garde, comprise a movement defined by humanistic sensibilities, cultural / critical perspectives, and craft in harmony with equally refined conceptual vision. In this light, alternative process image making, as a mode of artistic expression, is not about the technique used, the camera, or whether the original was the result of digital or film capture. Nor is it about the artifact or accident within the image that represents a contemporary artistic gesture, miraculously making an image artistic and meaningful. Alternative process image making has its heartbeat intimately allied to a tradition of making images by hand, using light and chemistry. It is driven by a curiosity to see where a process, or its integration with other media, will lead the artist and her imagination. In our current transformation as a medium we are experiencing the right time-right place gift of the unlimited possibilities of alternative photographic practice, making this the most exciting time in the photographic arts in over a century. It represents, in my mind, the new photography.
04-06-15 Show opens at Options Gallery, Odessa, Texas
05-08-15 Show closes
Link to Texas Photographic Society: http://www.texasphoto.org/
