Exhibition: A Sense of Place

I'm incredibly excited that my photo is one of 35 that have been selected by juror Jane Fulton Alt for exhibition at The PhotoPlace Gallery's "A Sense of Place". I've been spending so much time lately photographing Jeeps to pay the bills while my heart is really in fine art and struggling with finding balance, and since I like to photograph strange things I find in the desert it can be hard to find a good fit for my images, so this is a great mental boost for me on many levels. I'm doubly excited because of the qualifications of the juror -

Jane Fulton Alt’s photographs explore universal issues of humanity and the non–material. She is the three-time winner of Photolucida’s Critical Mass for her Katrina and Burn portfolios, recipient of the 2007 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Award, and multiple Ragdale Foundation Fellowships. She has authored two books; Look and Leave: Photographs and Stories of New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward,and The Burn. Her Crude Awakening portfolio was published worldwide.
She received the Photo District News 2011 Curators Choice Award and the 2012 Humble Arts 31 Women in Art Photography award. Alt’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Smithsonian National Museum of American History, New Orleans Museum of Art, De Paul University Art Museum, Southwest Museum of Photography, Beinecke Library at Yale University, Centro Fotografico Alvarez Bravo in Oaxaca, Mexico, Center for Photography at Woodstock, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, and the collection of William Hunt.

The Call for Entries:
Photographs that convey a “sense of place” blend the physical characteristics of a scene, landscape or object with the mysterious essence that emerges from gradually and perhaps unconsciously inhabiting a place over time. The photograph ceases to become an objective document. Instead, it takes on a particular feeling that is invested with something that is often intangible, revealing a deeper understanding of what lies beneath the surface.

A special thanks to photographer Marc Briggs for his personal guided tour of Carrizo Plain, mostly in the rain! Marc shoots there often and he helped me feel the Sense of Place in a way that I wouldn't have discovered so quickly on my own. I hope to be able to join him out there again one day, and I can't wait to take my husband out there one day and show him around. Carrizo Plain is a large grassland where the antelope (and tule elk) still roam and it boasts some amazing landscape...mountains, forests, wildlife, petroglyphs, the San Andreas Fault and the brilliant Soda Lake (a dry lake, but not the same Soda Dry Lake of the Mojave Preserve). It's a wildlife and nature photographer's paradise, but Marc also showed me many of the old homesteads and ranches from when this was a thriving farm community.

...the funny thing is, I've been so busy with Jeeps that I haven't even finished processing all of the photos from this trip or made the gallery public on my website yet. You can view eight other images from the Carrizo Plain by clicking on the photo above, it just isn't listed in the menu. We had such weather extremes that I have one set that is dark and moody, and another that is bright and bold and colorful. I haven't decided yet whether to combine them in one gallery. I always prefer dark and moody

And don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't enjoy photographing Jeeps, off road events, and trail adventures. I love every minute of it and I'm incredibly fortunate to get paid to do it. But it does get hard sometimes when I want to remain in a location and wait for the light to change for the "perfect" photo, or take the time to set up some lights to make the exact image I want, but I have to keep moving because I have a schedule to keep. For the most part, it's "taking" photos not making them. They are both satisfying for different reasons; it's just a completely different mindset.