Featuring Liz Albert with Peter Nohrnberg and Diana Cheren Nygren

‘Tis the season of family celebrations in person or on Zoom and always mediated through a lens. Liz Albert‘s series, Family Fictions, explores the dichotomy of memory and the constructed realities so often captured in photos. To create her humorous and thought provoking images Albert gathered anonymous slides of family experiences from Ebay and by selecting and pairing the images in a different context, she gives new meaning to what is seen on the surface and the relationships within the frames. Pairing the found photos allows her to create the story lines in a cinematic style reminiscent of spliced Super8.

Liz Albert is a photographic artist who has exhibited her work in group shows throughout the United States including, The Griffin Museum of Photography, The Photographic Resource Center, The Photographic Center Northwest and The Houston Center for Photography. Online and print features include: Fisheye Magazine, Fotoroom, Fraction Magazine, Lenscratch, Analog Forever and Ain’t Bad, as well as the French weekly magazine, Courrier International. In addition, her work was in the national exhibition of The Fence 2018, touring seven cities throughout the US and Canada. Her ”Family Fictions” series was recently featured in a solo exhibition at The Danforth Museum of Art, in Framingham, Massachusetts and at the Revela’t Contemporary Analog Photography Festival in Barcelona, Spain. She holds a BFA from the University of Michigan, an MFA in photography from Maryland Institute College of Art, and a post-baccalaureate in teaching from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She is originally from Grand Rapids, Michigan and lives with her family in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Diana Cheren Nygren is a fine art photographer from Boston, Massachusetts. Her work explores the visual character of place defined through physical environment and weather, addressing serious social questions through a blend of documentary practice, invention, and humor. During the isolation resulting from the pandemic, family has taken on a new centrality for Nygren and her current work reflects an exploration as to why connections to ancestors and descendants often feel stronger than connections to those around us. With her newest images her wish to connect to her own ancestors is almost fulfilled. Diana Cheren Nygren was trained as an art historian with a focus on modern and contemporary art, and the relationship of artistic production to its socio-political context. Her emphasis on careful composition in her photographic work, as well as her subject matter, reflects this training.

Peter Nohrnberg is scholar of literary modernism, a poet, and a life-long photographer, Nohrnberg has been a member of the PRC since 2007, where in the recent past he has presented portfolios of landscape photography and street photography.  In 2017 and 2018, he exhibited photographs as part of the Worcester Arts One shows and portfolios of his work are currently on view on Visura.co, where in 2014 his portfolio entitled “Interior Play” advanced to the Second Round of the FotoVisura Grant.  Nohrnberg’s series, Family Posers, reflects his interest in the tension between the given and the made, the ostensibly “authentic” and the patently artificial. His photographs of his family call attention to their nature as deliberate re-presentation. The often formal, and sometimes outright contrived qualities of a number of my family photographs mirrors – and even mocks – his family’s interest in visual culture, especially painting, while many of the photographs in the series speak to the importance of dress-up, play, and make-believe in the life of children.

PRC Nights Online: Modern Pet Photography
featuring Fred Levy with PRC Members
Tsar Fedorsky and David Moore

Fred Levy started taking photos of pets by first focusing on his adopted dog Toby, and then other dogs around the neighborhood. Traveling to local dog parks lit a spark that gave him clarity of what he wanted to shoot. Levy has always enjoyed photographing people in a candid, casual way but before Toby he had never applied that idea to animals. He quickly discovered that this was something he really loved, and led him down a path of seeing all kinds of other great photographers who focus on pets as their subject matter.

Presenting along with Levy are PRC Members Tsar Fedorsky and David Moore. Tsar Fedorsky is an American photographer. Her work centers on personal yet relatable narratives. She is currently merging traditional and digital photographic techniques, and examining the tactile qualities of the photographic print. David Moore is a painter, photographer, videographer, and musician. He teaches Visual Arts at Arlington High School.

Nighttime Photography
PRC Nights Online featuring Howie Motenko

Mastering the art of nighttime photography
is no small feat. Join us on September 22nd
for an evening exploring this captivating topic
featuring the work of Howie Motenko.

As an Artist in Residence in Acadia National
Park, Motenko spent two years creating images
that fuse his creative sensibilities with his
observations of the natural world. His black
and white photographs reflect his interpretation
of how our eyes perceive the primeval, nighttime landscape. The long exposure images in Motenko’s Acadia Moon Dance and his Painting Islands
series reveal expand time and allow for the moon’s illumination to reveal a mystical scene in an
otherwise dark landscape.

Presenting work alongside Howie Motenko is PRC Members Tony Attardo, a Southern New Hampshire based photographer who is is passionate about using his camera to illustrate the essence of the day to day found in small urban spaces, and as a means to bring cultures and lives together.

PRC Nights Online featuring Steve Bennett
along with Paul light, Stephen Sheffield, and Tara Khan

Photomontage may have come to prominence with Hannah Höch but digital media has turned it on its head. Neuroscientist David Eagleman describes the creative process in terms of “bending, breaking, and blending.” which to photographer Steve Bennett is the essence of experimental digital collage. Bennett begins with traditional photographs and uses Photoshop to bend, break, and blend them into composite images. 

Steve Bennett’s passion for photography began during the era of film cameras and processing. Today, his digital work lies at the intersection of “what is” and “what if,” fusing photographs of natural and human made elements into surreal and imaginary worlds, presented in print and multimedia formats. Additional PRC members presenting on the 18th are Paul Light, Stephen Sheffield and Tira Khan who will be presenting their own Experimental Digital Collage.

Featuring Harry Scales along with Matthew Kamholtz and Ellen Feldman

Harry Scales is a Fine Art & Editorial photographer working in New York & Boston recently graduated from the New England School of Photography’s full-time program. Influenced heavily by photographers who’ve made their work on the streets of cities & towns, Harry continues the tradition of exploring man’s relationship with one another amid society’s grapple with time.

Currently he is documenting the Black Lives Matter protests in Boston and his work inspired the theme for this edition of PRC Nights Online. Matthew Kamholtz and Ellen Feldman will also be sharing their work. Kamholtz has been photographing the recent protests through the medium of TV due to the corona virus and Feldman will show images from her project, Photographs and Reflections on the Women’s March, January 21, 2017.

Click HERE to see a video of the presentation.

Featuring Greig Cranna, Steve Dunwell, Ravneet Marwaha, Diana Cheren Nygren

Anyone can take a picture of a building, but it takes someone who understands the fundamental relationship of space to form, light on shape, and the scope of structure to environment to fully capture architecture as image. Architectural Photography is a way of seeing that Greig Cranna has immersed himself in for several decades and on June 30th he will share his work with us and discuss how one project influences the next. Cranna is is a professional photographer and the owner of BRIDGE Gallery in North Cambridge, Massachusetts, he is also on the Board of the PRC. Additional exhibitors are, Steve Dunwell, Ravneet Marwaha, and Diana Cheren Nygren. Each photographer will share their own unique view of what architectural photography can be.

featuring Asia Kepka, Eileen Powers, Jaina Cipriano and Nadine Wallack

Thank you to our presenters and all who attended!

Staged Fictions:

PRC Nights on April 22nd was all about work created through still life or set design or using costumes. Before sheltering in place, or experimenting in the confines of your home, staging or creating scenarios that imply story or narrative whether sedate or boisterously fantastical. Asia Kepka uses costumes and props in her work, and with her Horace and Agnes series she constructed a whole social fabric of their relationship. The staged fiction is something akin to a film stills or photographs of a play.