Photography keeps stretching the boundaries of creativity and imagination and ‘Photomorphosis’ symbolizes a fresh and innovative way of crafting and creating photographic images. Photomorphosis involves the use of latest digital imaging skills which stretch an image into a more nonfigurative, dreamlike or a canvas image. The exhibits are of commonplace subjects, but take on a surreal appearance thanks to the photographer, who anticipated the end-product and stretched, brushed, shaded, painted and layered the original photograph and through the use of technology took the picture to a new elevated level.

 

 

A new exhibition at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art exhibits a wide range of outstanding images by photographers, who have, through skilled use of modern techniques that vary from texture addition to photo montages to filter effects creating an end product that reflects the photographer’s originality and inventions, giving it a unique individuality, akin to the type that is associated with an artist and his painting.

The pictures were chosen by Richard Martin, who is an expert on photography having contributed to Photo Life magazine and conducted annual workshops and seminars on photography and virtual design across the country.

Martin says that each exhibit reflects the individual approach of the photographer and hence each image has characteristics of its own. He further notes that it is the photographer not his camera that defines the end product, “The individual must bring his or her creativity to the tool, “he says.

Conventional photography supporters do not approve of such mutating and consider it to be an intrusion and meddling in a pristine art form.  However, even though the displays in the exhibition were all extensions of a photographer’s innovative ways and showed that photography methods were undergoing inescapable change; visitors were pleasantly surprised at the artistic quality of the images on display.

Some of the images evoked nostalgic memories and seemed to be from an age long past. One such was the photo captioned, ‘Havana Train Yard’ in which the photographer Chuck Behrmann had used contemporary time-lapse technology to give it a sepia-hued exterior. Behrmann uses hand-colored tint that takes the viewer back to old times in photography in his second exhibit, ‘Havana Locomotive.’

The photographs on display show how far beyond the traditional the form has evolved. Elizabeth Haslam’s ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll’ is poetry in motion. Its silhouette imagery, with the waves breaking out and the surfer in a dancing pose, push the photograph to the realms of fine-art than being just a mere camera image. Similarly Anna Plotkin’s ‘Off To Work’ seems to have been painted with a brush using water colors, giving it a painting like appearance. Nearly all the images have something or the other that makes them stand out from the rest.

There are other exhibits that also catch attention and merit a special mention, among them Kabe Russell’s “A Place To Dream” is sheer fantasy, a graphic doorway to heaven and seems inspired by the artwork of Salvador Dali. Alison Watt-Jackson’s ‘Huntress’ is eccentric but eye-catching. The photographer has chosen a background with cave etchings and a black African girl with antlers growing out of her head

All the photographers have used different styles and methods pushing convention photography boundaries, with astonishing results. Some of them have used two or three styles and this has resulted in something that is unusual and unforeseen.

The exhibition is worth viewing and will take the viewer to new realms in photography. The exhibition is scheduled to close on November 18 and it is certain to vow the viewer for whom it promises to be a worthwhile and rich experience.

Google+

Share This

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•