Featuring Karen Olson along with Liz Albert, Gary Duehr, and Tiziana Rozzo

Early photography involved often cumbersome and delicate apparatus including large cameras, and glass plates which yielded handheld objects such as daguerreotypes, tintypes, and carte de visite. With the advent of roll film, photographers were more easily able to make prints on paper which were still objects though most often relegated to walls and no longer handheld. In the digital world photographs are most often viewed on pocket-sized screens, severing the connection between hand, eye, and image making. As wet darkrooms are more difficult to find, the craft of photography is less a hands-on art prompting some photographers to gravitate towards tactile image making techniques and three-dimensional photo objects. PRC Nights: Photo as Object showcases photographers working with sculptural methods and mixed media to present their images outside of the frame.

Featured photographer Karen Olson is a lens-based artist working at the intersection of human emotion and the natural world. In her figurative and nature-inspired work, Karen uses concept-based projects to explore the human-nature connection and its role in fostering mental health and communication. Karen seeks an open dialog with subjects such as grief, trauma, empathy, and forest bathing. She illustrates these multi-sensory experiences by blending and layering photographic elements to create ethereal and immersive imagery. Recently interviewed for her project Wildlight by the Maine Museum of Photographic Arts, her sculptural photography has gained attention and press. Her work has been featured by the Griffin Museum of Photography, Art New England magazine, and One Twelve Publishing. Karen was chosen as an Rfotofolio selected artist for 2021. Several of her images from an additional project, Between Two Worlds, were chosen for the show Behind the Lens-Women in Photography at the Rhode Island Center for Photography. Her book with the same title was included in the Davis-Orton/Griffin Museum Photobook Show. Karen’s work has been included in gallery shows as well as online and print magazines such as LA Photo Curator, NY Photo Curator, Torpedo Art Center, the Rhode Island Center for Photography, The Hand, Overexposed Magazine, and Don’t Take Pictures. Sweet Haven Gallery hosted her show Wildheart this past summer in Newburyport, MA. 

Liz Albert is a photographic artist who has exhibited her work in shows throughout the United States and abroad. Online and print features include: Fisheye Magazine, Fotoroom, Fraction Magazine, Lenscratch, Photo-Emphasis, Ain’t Bad and Maake, as well as the French weekly magazine, Courrier International. In addition, her Family Fictions series was exhibited in The Fence 2018, which toured seven cities throughout the US and Canada. Solo exhibitions include: The Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham, MA and the Revela’t Contemporary Analog Photography Festival in Barcelona, Spain. Her most recent exhibit was an outdoor public art installation of her series, Instant Classic, with collaborator, Shane VanOosterhout, at ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, MI. 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.

Boston based Italian fine art photographer Tiziana Rozzo, a graduate student in Photography and Integrated Media at Lesley University, explores the play between representation and reality in photographs through the notion of perception, memory and materiality. Tiziana was a recipient of the Arnold P. Gold Foundation Grant for the Arts, Medicine and Humanities, Harvard Medical School, a finalist for the 2016 John Chervinsky Emerging Photographer Scholarship and the recipients of grants and scholarships, including the 2020 Strauch Mosse Merit Scholarship from Lesley University and the 2021 Paddle Rise Scholarship , Anderson Ranch ArtsCenter, Snowmass, CO. She had exhibited her prints and photographic artist’s books at the 2019 Boston Art Book Fair and at the Penland School of Craft, NC, Danforth-Art Museum, The Griffin Museum and at Lesley University.  In 2018 she had her first solo exhibit at Colgate University, NY. Tiziana’s artist’s book series Interstellar Ice is in numerous private collections and in the Special Collection of The W. Van Alan Clark, Jr. Library at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA)/Tisch Library/ Tuft University.

Gary Duehr has been chosen as a Best Emerging Artist in New England by the International Association of Art Critics, and he has received an Artist Grant in photography from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. His work has been featured in museums and galleries including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; MOMA PS 1, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, Cuba, as well as exhibitions in Tokyo, Venice, Stockholm, London and Barcelona. Past awards include grants from the LEF Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. His public artworks include a video artwork for the Canadian subway system; a photo installation funded by the Visible Republic program of New England Foundation for the Arts, and a commission from the MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority) for a permanent photo installation at North Station. Duehr has written about the arts for journals including ArtScope, Art New England, Art on Paper, Communication Arts, Frieze, and Public Culture. Currently he manages Bromfield Gallery in Boston’s South End.

Thank you to Washington Street
Gallery and Studios
for supporting this event!

August 27, 6:30pm, PRC Nights: EXPOSURE 2021
• An online event.
• Register HERE to see work and hear from exhibitors across the USA including Lee Day, David Gardner, and Hannah Altman.

July 30, 6:30pm, PRC Nights: EXPOSURE 2021
Massachusetts exhibitors presented their work: Diane Bennett, Kristen Joy Emack, Tira Khan,
Elizabeth Clark Libert, and Cindy Weisbart.

What began as a two-week quarantine turned into a seemingly endless stretch of seclusion. The hardships were many and continue to cause a wide range of adverse affects including financial, emotional, and health-related challenges. Those living with family members learned new meanings of the word “togetherness” and did all they could to navigate space, technology, and privacy, to make their new world habitable.

PRC Nights Online: Pandemic Family is an opportunity to see how photographers sheltering with their families stayed creative during the past 18-months. Our featured photographer, Sonia Targontsidis, is Based in the Boston area and earned an MFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and an MBA from Simmons University. Her work has been featured in curated and juried shows at venues across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. Sonia works in higher education and fills her weekends with freelance work, when she isn’t negotiating new images with her family.

Becky Behar began her Homespun portfolio during the months of quarantine in 2020 when her college aged children all came back home. After dinner, she would often find them sitting together and knitting in order to create something that keeps them safe and warm. For this series she collaborated with her children using their act of knitting as a metaphor to construct a visual story of their pandemic lives. Becky Behar was born in Colombia and now lives in Boston. She has participated in group and solo exhibitions throughout the United States including solo shows with the Griffin Museum of Photography and at Workspace Gallery in Lincoln, NE. Becky also had work included in EXPOSURE 2021.

Featuring Kamal X with Steve Edson and Ilene Perlman

Travel photography means different things to different people. For some it is documentation of an excursion. For some, it is an expression of the feeling of a place at a particular time, portraying a land, its people, or a culture. Whether it’s landscape, portraiture, documentary, or something in between, photographs during travel tell a story and visually share an experience. During this past year the pandemic has prevented travel for most people and with this PRC nights we can vicariously explore the world and feel pulled into the images as if we were there.

PRC Nights Online: Travel Photography features photographer Kamal X who says of his work, “My path to redefining myself was an unexpected journey that was rooted in compassion and extreme honesty. A difficult yet necessary journey that taught me the importance of embracing the truth in order to make progress. As a photographer I strive to create images that represent those same core elements to give a voice to the unheard and misunderstood.” Kamal was born in 1986 and grew up in Newark, NJ. He attended Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD and Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA though he is a self-taught documentary photographer currently based out of Brooklyn, New York. Photography found Kamal in 2015, after deciding to travel the world in honor of his best friend who passed away due to colon cancer. Kamal’s 2020 work covering the BLM Protests of Oakland, CA and Washington D.C. was featured in the New York Times leading to his first gallery appearance with 111 Minna Gallery of San Francisco, CA. Those images became a series entitled The Beautiful: Oakland to D.C., with which he won 2nd place in Lensculture’s Black & White Photography Awards. More recently, Kamal was featured in Apple’s “Hometown” campaign which highlighted black photographers across America and this year he self-published his debut photography book, A Quest Supreme, which documents 5 years of traveling to more than 40 countries in search of inner peace.

Also sharing work is PRC Member Ilene Perlman who has been photographing within the editorial, educational, non-profit and corporate world for more than 25 years. Her work can be found in leading editorial publications, marketing materials for the travel industry including global travel companies, and in advertising and annual reports. Some of her work for NGO’s has included Save the Children, Habitat for Humanity, USAID, the Peace Corp and Oxfam USA. Ilene’s passion as a travel photographer stems from the thrill of capturing an unexpected moment. Whether traveling to the Comoros Islands for a travel story, traversing rural Yemen and India documenting health programs for an NGO, wandering the labyrinth of the old city in Cairo for an in-flight magazine, documenting the faces of the women coffee farmers in Rwanda, and seeking out Jewish communities in Morocco, Ethiopia, Cuba, and more she cherishes the moments not predicted on her itinerary. For Ilene, her photography has also been a way to explore the political and social complexities of these cultures, that both share similarities and differences with that of the western world, “My camera acts as a veil allowing me to get past the comfort zone that we have created in western society to keep our set distances from each other.  To enter the zone of “intimacy” is something that is much more accepted and assumed in many cultures in the world. My camera helps to let me in and opens me up to the complex world of the people I meet.”

After Steve Edson lost eyesight in one eye at age 8, he was given a camera by a neighbor, and it was with that plastic Kodak that he began to consider the qualities of what makes a photograph worth looking at beyond the initial cursory glance. Influenced by Life Magazine and National Geographic, Steve was exposed to compelling stories that talented photographers were creating, and in high school took his first photography class, learning the basics of developing film and making B+W prints. At 15 he was commissioned for his first commercial job, and after attending Goddard College in Vermont, Steve transferred to MassArt where he majored in photography and graduated with a BFA in Inter-Related Media. He then began working for editorial publications, advertising agencies, and corporations enabling him to build a roster of clients while also continuing to explore fine art photography, which he does to this day some 40 years later. Steve Edson will also be sharing work from his ‘Someplace Else’ series where he uses the camera to describe the subtle visual details of his world. Being both a part of the environment and simultaneously being an observer, he creates stories: real and fictional, which tie together diverse visual relationships. ‘Someplace Else’ is a collection of Steve’s images made along the way to other places. They celebrate the small moments between here and there. Believing that he doesn’t have to glamorize travel, he’s free to see the world as it is: in all of its natural beauty as well as in its various states of quirky and humorous juxtapositions. Ultimately as a visual storyteller, Steve is fascinated by the distillation and convergence and the ultimate transformation which an image undergoes from the moments of inspiration to a final framed print.

Featuring work by Christine Collins with Emily L. Ferguson and Mary Gillis

Ecological focused art is a genre with a purpose created by artists who are concerned with the state of both local and global environmental situations. Many photographers working with this theme focus on ecological activism and the highlighting of issues that help improve an area environmentally and/or that highlights a specific environmental issue. By bringing their concerns to light through visual means it makes a strong impact. The work of eco photographers improves our relationship with the natural world and addresses aesthetics, ethics, politics, culture, and economics.

In her series Reclamation, photographer Christine Collins photographed the same family’s compost pile over a period of time. It was located in the back corner of a well-tended yard, a sprawling, wild and ever changing pile. Her interest is in how the physicality of the pile changed with the seasons and references both cycles of time and contemporary desires. The centuries’ old agrarian practice reminds us of who we want to be. This series focuses on the sustainable food movement, a catchphrase for a practice that long precedes us, reinvigorated our relationship to the landscape. Local farms have become temples to this movement and are the backdrops for our fantasies about a harmonious participation in the landscape. We seek to make this halcyon vision congruent with the many hours most of us spend inside.

Christine Collins is an artist whose work focuses on our often fraught relationship to the cultivated landscape. Collins earned a BA from Skidmore College and an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design.  Her work has been widely exhibited and featured in numerous publications including On Death, published in 2019 by Kris Graves Projects, The New Yorker and The Boston Globe. In 2017, Roman Nvmerals Books published her limited-edition artist book Oil/Cloth. Collins is the recipient of a St. Botolph Club artist fellowship and was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council artist fellowship in photography. Her work is represented by Gallery Kayafas in Boston and she is currently an associate professor and chair of BFA Photography and Interdisciplinary Studies at Lesley Art + Design.

Emily L. Ferguson is a photographer located in North Falmouth on Cape Cod.  Her work exposes ecosystems and their changes over time under environmental pressures with a strong overlay of their surviving beauty, intimacy and solace.  During the 25 years that Ferguson has been photographing around the Cape and southeastern Massachusetts she has built a daily portfolio detailing the margin between land and water around the perimeter of Buzzards Bay over a 12 month period. She began her career in mid-life and is largely self-taught, inspired by some of the leading mid-century figures like Eliot Porter and Galen Rowell. Her vision straddles the classic environmental attention to the broad vista and the detailed world inside it.

Mary Gillis is a Boston native, a retired CPA. and has studied color theory and two-dimensional design at the School of the MFA, and artist books and printmaking at Boston University. She began photographing in the early 1970s with a Nikkormat SLR and in the 80s and 90s she made several hiking trips to the Indian Himalayas where she shot in black and white, her first love, then she moved to digital around 2004. In 2010 she began a series called ‘Trash’—attempting to raise awareness of wastefulness and in 2019 twelve images from that series were included in an exhibition titled “The Waste Land” at the Harvard Ed Portal in Allston. “As a photographer I’m interested in composition and color relationships. It occurred to me that if I could make photographs of trash that would draw a viewer in, that awareness of the trash problem would be increased.”

Featuring Caleb Charland with Richard Alan Cohen and John Hensel

It can be said that photography was birthed from science and throughout history they have maintained a symbiotic relationship. Camera construction in relation to machines and physics, chemical processes, compounds reacting with light, the development of optics and lenses, X-rays, and the wider contributions of photography to every aspect of modern culture, document and art.

It is with this long history in mind that we celebrate the strong connection of Photography and Science with the work of Caleb Charland whose every piece begins as a question of visual possibilities and develops in tandem with the natural laws of the world, “For me, wonder is a state of mind somewhere between knowledge and uncertainty. It is the basis of my practice and results in images that are simultaneously familiar yet strange… Energy vibrates in that space between our perceptions of the world and the potential the mind senses for our interventions within the world. This energy is the source of all true art and science and it allows us to sense the extraordinary in the common.”

Caleb Charland grew up in rural Maine and earned a BFA in photography from MassArt in 2004, an MFA as a Trustees Fellow from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010, was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009, and in 2016 he received the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in photography. Caleb’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in venues such as Michael Mazzeo Gallery, New York in 2011, Gallery Kayafas, Boston in 2013 and 2017, Sasha Wolf Gallery, New York in 2014 and 2016, and at Sarah Shepard Gallery, Larkspur, CA in 2019. He has been included in dozens of group shows including at ClampArt, New York, Brancolini Grimaldi in London, the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, ME, and at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. Caleb’s work is included in several major collections including at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Progressive Collection, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He has received press including coverage in The New Yorker, Collector Daily, Photo District News, and the Wall Street Journal, among others.

Richard Alan Cohen attended Bowdoin College where he co-majored in art and science. Having always maintained an avid interest in art, he has now transitioned from a 40-year career in cardiovascular research to being a full-time fine art photographer. Cohen’s photographs highlight his reverential relationship with the environment resulting in constructed imagined landscapes, providing a larger than life perspective to emphasize the importance of the environment. Manipulating light, color, and movement give his images an otherworldly appearance to set the subjects apart from ordinary reality in which they are threatened by climate change. Where photography and science intersect in Cohen’s work are in the aspects of discovering subject, light, and color in the field with the imagination and creativity involved in developing the editing and printing of each image. These actions have distinct similarities in Cohen’s two careers, photographer and scientist, seen in much of his work as grand landscapes have been re-contextualized from far smaller environmental details in order to magnify the importance of the fate of the environment.

John Hensel is a photographer in Cambridge, MA. His current work is engaged in embodying effects that defy our intuition but are rigorously grounded in science such as his series, On the Reversibility of Physical Law. This work engages with time as a concept in physics. All classical laws operate the same with time running forward as with time running backwards, yet we experience time flowing inexorably in one direction. As seen in, Configurations in Infinite Time, “…the work was created over an infinite duration (in a steady state universe), all possible states will fluctuate into and out of existence. Every step here taking longer than the lifetime of our universe.”

Featuring Amy Giese with Daniel Ranalli and Rosalie Rosenthal

Cameraless photography is all about light; an energy that can make something tangible, physical and transform an inanimate object in a way that is unique to photographic imaging. For Amy Giese the process of cameraless photography, whether it is chemical or digital, is inserted between her experience of a moment and what is formed and made fixed through the process of photography. Join Amy Giese with Daniel Ranalli and Rosalie Rosenthal as they share their work within this genre.

Amy Theiss Giese is a Boston based artist. She received her BA in Fine Arts from Amherst College (Amherst, MA) and an MFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design (New York, NY). Giese’s practice is grounded in photography but often is out at the edges of the medium, critiquing the materials of production and consumption, as well as searching for points of intersection with other mediums. Her work has been exhibited in the US, China, New Zealand, Czechia, and Scotland. Recent and upcoming solo shows include: The McDonough Museum of Art (2021 Youngstown, OH), Granary Art Center (2018 Ephraim, UT), Flanagan Campus Art Gallery (2016 Lincoln, RI). Selected group shows include: Call and Response at Newport Art Museum, Image for Concept at the Hand Art Center and Southeast Museum of Photography, Sound Thought Festival in Glasgow, and Endless Days at the Pingyao Photo Festival, Pingyao CH. Giese has recently been featured in publications including PreCog Magazine and Art New England. She also recently completed residencies at Mass MoCA and at Signal Culture.

Daniel Ranalli has been working as a visual artist for more than 45 years with his first photograms made in 1974. Ranalli was drawn to the enormous potential for abstraction in photograms, as well as the rich tonal scale he could achieve. He wanted to make photographs that were mysterious and also looked like they were fabricated with light – which is the very genesis of the word photography – photo meaning light and graphy meaning writing. Ranalli’s work is in the permanent collections of thirty-plus museums in the US and abroad including the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Nelson-Atkins Museum, Harvard Art Museum, the George Eastman House, and the National Gallery of American Art. Daniel’s work has been included in more than 150 solo and group shows including at the ICA Boston, MFA Boston, List Gallery at MIT, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Rose Art Museum, the Davis Art Museum, DeCordova Museum and Harvard Art Museum. Daniel has also been the recipient of two artist fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and multiple artist fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

With her multi-media artwork Rosalie Rosenthal strives for an experience of discovery, one where the practice of looking beyond patent functionality cultivates a vision with nuance and possibility. Her projects develop from the process of seeing objects as they are and imagining them as something else; they feel alive in the act of creating—drawing potential from material and metaphor from context.

Rosalie Rosenthal (b. St. Louis, MO) is an artist living in Louisville, Kentucky working in digital and camera-less photography. She earned a BFA from the University of Louisville’s Hite Art Institute and her BA in History from Smith College. Her work has been exhibited at the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft and Spalding University and is in the collection of 21c Museum Hotels and individual collectors.

Featuring presentations by Online Gallery exhibitors:
Claudio Eshun, MassArt
Jacob Geiger, MassArt
Lillian Gendreau, Lesley Art + Design
Jessie James, Lesley Art + Design
Ashton Stuart Lyle, MassArt
Erin McDermott, Endicott College
Jenna Tessler, Lesley Art + Design
Ali Trepanier, Lesley Art + Design
Gia Williams, Lesley Art + Design

Join us in celebrating the photographers of the 2021 PRC Student Exhibition hailing from 7 of our Institutional Member schools: Emerson College, Endicott College, Lesley College of Art & Design, MassArt, Northeastern University, SMFA at Tufts and Wellesley College. This year the PRC Student Exhibition will be presented as an on-line exhibition and selected prints will be on view in-person at Panopticon Gallery to whom we express gratitude for hosting this annual exhibition.

Click HERE see the entire online exhibition.

Featuring William Betcher, Jesseca Ferguson, Jaclyn Kain, Cynthia Katz

Photographic methods have greatly changed since its earliest beginnings, most notably in the shift from analog to digital and wet to dry. With cameras in our pockets and printers at the ready one is hard pressed in 2021 to find a traditional wet darkroom to process and enlarge negatives. Despite the many technological changes and shifting trends, there is still a creative attraction to hands-on photographic methods and 19th century processes. During the past year the PRC has been highlighting several of these techniques and the photographers who work with them. Programs have included Sunday Studio Demos on cyanotype with Susan Murie and on lumens with Sarah Pollman, the PRC also co-hosted the Davis Museum’s online symposium, Handmade Photography Today: A Virtual Artist Talk, and from August 7 – September 11, 2021 the PRC is producing a Handmade Photography Workshop. In advance of the workshop and to continue spotlighting photographers working in this genre, PRC Nights Online: Handmade Photography features four photographers who each practice different handmade photographic techniques, William Betcher, Jesseca Ferguson, Jaclyn Kain, Cynthia Katz.

William Betcher’s photographic work has been displayed at the Griffin Museum, Catamount Arts, Danforth Art, Mass Audubon, Massachusetts General Hospital, the Norris Cotton Cancer Center, and the University of New England. His book of landscape photography was included in Photobook 2016 at the Griffin Museum and he is the author of four other nonfiction books. He is a psychiatrist in private practice and Photography Editor at Solstice Literary Magazine. He received an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, his MD from Harvard Medical School, and a Ph.D. from Boston University.

Jesseca Ferguson works with pinhole photography, 19th century photo processes and collage. Her pinhole photographs and collaged “photo objects” have been included in solo and group exhibitions in the United States and Europe. Ferguson has received numerous grants to support her projects and has participated in national and international artist residencies. Her work has also been published in books, catalogues, and articles on the subject of handmade photography and since 1998, she has been engaged in cultural exchange with artists in Poland. Jesseca lives and works in Boston and currently teaches at SMFA.

Cynthia Katz is a Concord, Massachusetts-based artist and teacher. Her work has been shown regionally and nationally, is published in journals, books and blogs, including Manifest’s International Photography Annual 3. Cynthia has a BFA in Photography from the University of New Hampshire and an MFA in Photography from Bennington College. She maintains a studio at The Umbrella Arts Center in Concord, MA and she recently curated “Origin Stories”, an exhibit that showcased 22 former students from her career at Concord Academy teaching photography and handmade books, who have gone onto successful careers in the arts.

Jaclyn Kain teaches photography at Simmons University and works as a corporate art photographer for Fidelity Investments. Her work is represented by Gallery NAGA in Boston and has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout New England. Included in various private, university, and museum collections, her images have been published in national publications. She received her undergraduate degree from Simmons University and completed the MFA Photography program at the New Hampshire Institute of Art in 2016. She resides in Watertown.