By Puloma Ghosh Somerville, MA - The Somerville Toy Camera Festival, spanning through five different galleries across Somerville, shows how one can make art just by playing around. Now in its second year, the Toy Camera Festival exhibits the potential of toy cameras when placed in the right hands. The Brickbottom Gallery (1 Fitchburg St.) in south Somerville is currently host to an array toy camera photographs by artists all across the nation. Most of the work uses Holga medium format plastic cameras, and various pinhole cameras. The subjects vary from nature, people, abstract close-ups, and urban landscapes, but the nature of the toy cameras gives every piece a soft, surreal look to them, as if snapshots of a dream. “La Porte des Étoiles” and “Aube Lunaire” by Romary Daval, both taken with a film canister pinhole camera, show scenes of passing night. A distant tree line is … [Read more...] about Say Cheese! Somerville Toy Camera Festival
Street Photography
Conversation with the Curator: Winogrand’s Women are Beautiful at Worcester Art Museum
By Chad Sirois Worcester, MA - Interest in the work of Garry Winogrand has had a resurgence of late. With an exhibition of unpublished photographs at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) (March-June, 2013), inclusion in a street photography exhibition at the Smith College of Art Museum (July-October 6, 2013), and an exhibition of his portfolio “Women are Beautiful” (August-November 10, 2013) now on view at the Worcester Art Museum, it is hard for the museum-going public to avoid his complex and ambiguous imagery. Heavily influenced by the likes of Robert Frank and Henri Carter-Bresson, Winogrand’s brand of photography is often open to speculation, interpretation, and criticism. Much like fellow street photographer Diane Arbus, his work is routinely marred as exploitative — particularly his portfolio, “Women are Beautiful.” I sat down with Nancy Burns, Curator of … [Read more...] about Conversation with the Curator: Winogrand’s Women are Beautiful at Worcester Art Museum