Featuring photographers Becky Wilkes, Rita Koehler, and Mikael Owunna

This event is free to attend and open to the public. Register HERE

Our October PRC Nights Online will be hosted by J. Sybylla Smith, a visual activist captivated by the power of photography to create individual and collective change in exhibition and book form. She has curated solo and group exhibitions featuring the work of more than 100 international photographers. In addition to being an independent curator, Smith collaborates with emerging to seasoned professionals to illuminate, elevate and amplify their work focusing on exploring content, identifying impactful images and developing a powerful presentation in image and text. For the past decade she has taught her unique creative curriculum, Concept Aware® through workshops and lectures created a framework to provide a structure of exploration to the creative process and strengthen artistic practice.

“It is my pleasure to share the work of three contemporary photographers, Becky Wilkes, Rita Koehler, and Mikael Owunna. Each of their subject matter and creative practice is highly unique. They will share visuals of current work, discuss how their concepts evolved and their innovations to present their work in the most impactful forms in image, multi-media and text. I met each photographer at a portfolio review which led to our further collaborations. A component of our discussion will address specifics of our collaboration, how our relationship developed and it’s impact on their work.” – J. Sybylla Smith

Becky Wilkes lives on Eagle Mountain Lake in Azle, TX. Educated as a Chemical Engineer at Texas A&M, she chose to spend much of her life as a stay-at-home mother of four children who have now blessed her with a multitude of grandchildren. Thus began her study of chaos and order which permeates much of her work including her pre-pandemic project Ditched, which examines thousands of items of trash collected from the lakefront. When the pandemic began, she felt compelled to bring her declining parents to live with her and her husband, pivoting her to portraiture of the fated couple. Twice recognized as Photolucida’s Critical Mass Top 50, Till Death Do Us Part bares witness to the struggles of mortality, aging, and grief. Recently exhibited in Fort Worth and curated with and by J. Sybylla Smith, the multimedia exhibition illuminated the love, intimacy, and vulnerability shared between Wilkes and her parents.

Rita Koehler is an American photographer and lens-based artist, who grew up by the little Blue River in Kansas City, Missouri. Her series, Glitch Mommy, evolves from a personal story of an unsuccessful, decade long attempt to adopt and all that came with that experience. These lens-based artworks document the historical context in which she and her spouse, as two women married and living in the Midwest, pursued adoption previous to and during the passage of marriage equality laws. Glitch Mommy currently consists of a two time-based video installations and more than thirty, unique works created by layering images, then reworking each piece with water, paint, ink, and other media. Koehler received her BA in Psychology and Theology from Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, IN, completed her MFA in Visual Studies from Lesley University College of Art and Design, and completed a Certificate Program in Curatorial Studies through the University of Chicago. Past residencies include New Edition and The Center Program at Hyde Park Arts Center, Chicago; The Wild Residency – Artist in Residence – Venice, Italy; National Performance Network Residency through 516 Arts in Albuquerque; and Flash Powder Projects in Highlands, NC. Her works have been exhibited throughout the country as well as featured in Fraction Magazine, Focal Point, Cooking Light Magazine, and other commercial and university publications.

Mikael Owunna is a Nigerian American multi-media artist, filmmaker, and engineer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Exploring the intersections of visual media with engineering, optics, Blackness, and African cosmologies, his work seeks to elucidate an emancipatory vision of possibility that pushes people beyond all boundaries, restrictions, and frontiers. Owunna’s work has been exhibited across Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America and been collected by institutions such as the Nasher Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Equal Justice Initiative; Duke University Pratt School of Engineering; and National Taiwan Museum. His work has also been featured in media ranging from the New York Times to CNN, NPR, VICE, and The Guardian. He has lectured at venues including Harvard Law School, World Press Photo (Netherlands), Tate Modern (UK), and TEDx. Owunna has published two monographs: Limitless Africans (FotoEvidence, 2019) and Cosmologies (ClampArt, 2021). Owunna’s multi-media practice includes film, and in 2021 he directed the dance film Obi Mbu (The Primordial House) with Marques Redd. Owunna’s work has been commissioned for major public art installations by organizations including the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Foundation, Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh, Pittsburgh International Airport, and Orange Barrel Media.

This event is free to attend and open to the public. Register HERE

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Long-exposure photography can also be called time-exposure, or slow-shutter photography. The process involves using a long-duration shutter speed to capture the subject/s with an increased amount of light or with the intention of blurring, smearing, or obscuring the moving elements.

Douglas Breault is an interdisciplinary artist who overlaps elements of photography, painting, sculpture, and video to merge spaces both real and imagined. He kindles connections between the precarious nature of truth and an unfulfilled desire for certainty. Breault’s process blurs familiar objects and banal materials, like mirrors, furniture, and plaster, to reassemble traces of time with an interest in the limitations of photography. Photographs from the series “A Shot in the Dark” are printed directly on aluminum using a dye sublimation process, which reflects light similar to a mirror. His long-exposure photography does not use any digital manipulation. It presents imagery commonly used by Breault –– such as clouds, candles, and wilting plants –– to reference ideas of heaven and mark passages of time. Douglas Breault’s work has been included in exhibitions and screenings at various institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (MA), the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (South Korea), Space Place Gallery (Russia), the Bristol Art Museum (RI), the Rochester Museum of Fine Arts (NH), Amos Eno Gallery (NY), and VSOP Projects (NY). Breault has been an artist in residence at MassMoca and AS220 and was awarded the Montague Travel Grant to study in London and Paris in 2017. Douglas is a professor of art at Babson College, the Rhode Island School of Design, and Bridgewater State University. He has been a guest critic at MassArt, Kansas City Art Institute, Clark University, and the Slade College of Art, among others. Breault is the Exhibitions Director at Gallery 263 in Cambridge, MA and he received his MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and a BA in Studio Art from Bridgewater State University. He currently divides his time between Boston, MA, and Providence, RI. 

Sean K. Sullivan is a Boston-based Fine Art Photographer who focuses on creating strong graphic images with a focus on color, details and strong lines that draws in the viewer.  Sullivan’s newest series, Eighty-Sixed, explores abandoned structures at night through the use of long exposures and light painting to further enhance their rundown nature. These forgotten places represent a loss of identity, family, and time. Sullivan believes that photographing at night highlights the quietness and lack of humanity in the buildings. By using an artificial light source to light paint my subjects he creates the light which transforms the scene revealing the colors and details that lurk in the shadows. The colorful textures reflect the depth and history of each place and in exhibiting this work, he includes a background history of each property. Sullivan’s previous series, Classic Style, captures the details and lines of classic automobiles. In 2017, He was selected for the Critical Mass Top 200 and in 2014 was featured as an Emerging Artist by Panopticon Gallery. Sullivan has been exhibited nationally, most recently at the Griffin Museum of Photography, PhotoPlace Gallery, Danforth Art Museum, The Curated Fridge, Darkroom Gallery, Panopticon Gallery, Plymouth Center for the Arts and Morse Institute Library.  He holds a Bachelor of Science from Northeastern University where he majored in Graphic Design and Minored in Photography, and he studied with Neal Rantoul and Tom Petit. 

Leah Abrahams is a Boston-based visual artist who enjoys shooting abstract subjects, humans, objects in her environment and life in other cultures. She has been juried into numerous group shows, and had several one-woman shows. Her work is in corporate and private collections as well as Brown County Museum. Abrahams co-founded a co-op art and studio gallery in Wisconsin and is currently curating a show of Haifa and Boston artists working in multiple mediums. Her photo book “Do You See What I See?” has been selected for inclusion in the 13th Annual Self-Published Photobook Show presented by the Davis Orton Gallery, Hudson NY and the Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester MA. Abrahams intervenes in the process of photographing what she actually sees through movement. “In my first experiment, soon after I learned about the effects achievable with long exposures, I put my camera on my dashboard and set the timer to keep the shutter open for 15 seconds, all the while driving 70mph on a Wisconsin highway… Then I discovered that by jiggling the camera and moving it purposefully, I could produce even more engaging patterns. Sometimes the lights were moving, sometimes only my camera was moving or both happened simultaneously. The light photos I create reminded me of listening to jazz.” From the US to Cuba, Panama, Australia and other places Abrahams has experimented with long exposures, initially only applied light effects, and later in to capture the movement of everyday life. “Overall, how I move my camera and how long I permit light to enter, these decisions reflect my personal feelings about what I’m seeing and my desire for pleasing compositions. Not every outcome passes muster and many are discarded.”

Robert Knight received an MFA in photography from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design and a BA in architecture and economics from Yale University. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Danforth Museum of Art in Massachusetts, Jen Bekman Gallery and Light Work in New York, the LaGrange Museum in Georgia, The Bascom in North Carolina, the Houston Center for Photography in Texas, and at photography festivals in Nantes, Le Mans, and Arles, France. Knight has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Gallery Kayafas, Boston, MA, the Munson Williams Proctor Art Museum, Utica, NY, the Wellin Museum of Art, Clinton, NY, and the Dowd Gallery at SUNY Cortland. Knight often utilizes long-exposures to emphasize the differences between stationary physical elements and the people that inhabit and interact with the spaces. “In my current project Where the Visitors Are, I explore the interactions between people and art objects in museums and in public spaces. In contemporary culture, works of art, particularly those by artists deemed iconic, have become fetishized and our engagement with them ritualized. They are sought out for brief moments of contemplation and adoration, often captured with a cellphone image or selfie to document the experience. My work explores these encounters while exposing the artificial grandiosity of the spaces in which these moments occur.”

This event is free to attend and open to the public. Register HERE.

In celebration of EXPOSURE 2022, the 26th annual PRC Members juried exhibition, we are delighted to host four exhibiting photographers for this month’s PRC Nights Online. Supporting member photographers since 1996, more than 400 photographers have shown in EXPOSURE including an array of those established and emerging in the field. Each year a respected member of the photographic community—from curators to gallerists to publishers—is asked to select between 10 to 15 artists for exhibition. This year’s juror, Catherine Edelman, selected 12 photographers from nearly 200 entries.

Ohio artist, April Friges, creates her work in analog darkrooms with photosensitive paper or collodion wet plate, utilizing light and chemistry. Integrating traditional photographic darkroom prints with three-dimensional sculpting methods, her works relate image and object, perception and contemporary theory. Her work has been exhibited in venues including, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh, PA, The Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS, and The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, MI. Friges’ work is included in public and private collections such as The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL, Bank of New York Mellon Corporation and the Duane Michals Estate. April Friges received her MFA in studio art from The University of California, Irvine, and is Associate Professor of Photography at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, PA.

Jason Reblando is a Filipino-American photographer and artist, based in Normal, Il. His series, Field Notes, is comprised of photocollages based upon archival images from the American colonial period in the Philippines. By physically cutting, pasting, and rearranging various elements of the images he deconstructs and critiques the colonial gaze, while recontextualizing archives that codified colonial power dynamics between the U.S. and the Philippines. Reblando’s goal is that his project will contribute to a growing conversation by contemporary artists who are eager to interrogate the colonizing power for all members of the Global South. Jason Reblando received his MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago and BA in Sociology from Boston College. He is the recipient of a grants and awards such as U.S. Fulbright Fellowship, and two Artist Fellowship Awards from the Illinois Arts Council. His work has been published in outlets such as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, Chicago Tribune, Politico, Slate, Bloomberg Businessweek, Real Simple, and Chicago Magazine. Reblando’s photographs are in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Pennsylvania State University Special Collections, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He currently serves on the Society for Photographic Education Board of Directors and is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Illinois State University.

David Sokosh is a photographic artist based in Claverack, NY. He shoots film and works in Cyanotype, Tintype and Letterpress. His project, Things That Look Like the MOON (but are not the moon), is a playful examination of objects that look like the moon which explores perception vs. reality in photographs. Sokosh holds a BA in Photography from WCSU and has worked in New York as client liaison at Kelton Labs and was gallery director at Underbridge Pictures in DUMBO. His work has been included in exhibitions at venues including Equity Gallery, NYC, Shelburne Museum, VT, Carrie Haddad Gallery, Hudson, NY, and The Griffin Museum, Winchester, MA. Sokosh’s work has also been included in the Magnum Festival and his tintypes appeared in The New York Times. His work is in the permanent collections of the Shelburne Museum, The Kinsey Institute, Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL, Pfizer Collection, Polaroid Collection, and the Richard Gere Collection. David Sokosh is represented by Carrie Haddad Gallery, Hudson NY.

Sue Palmer Stone‘s series Embodiment — Salvaging a Self represents a salvage operation; retrieving something of value out of detritus and man-made cast-offs that would otherwise be lost or abandoned. It’s an effort to generate coherence and harmony in a dissonant, fragile, and precarious world, rendered more so as she contends with an autoimmune condition that has threatened her mobility. The sculptures she photographs speak to each other through shape, color, line, texture, gesture, attitude and atmosphere, referencing human frailty, and the question of what we can salvage from our experiences. Sue Palmer Stone is from Connecticut, graduated from Colby College in Maine, and then moved to New York to work in advertising and marketing. She studied photography at Silvermine Art School and from 2012 to 2021, she participated in Sandi Haber Fifield’s photography workshops. Stone’s work has been featured in LensCulture and made Time Magazine’s list of Best Photobooks of 2019. She has exhibited in venues such as the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Sohn Fine Art Gallery, Lenox, MA, PhotoPlace Gallery, Middlebury, VT, and the Vermont Center for Photography.

This event is free to attend and open to the public. Register HERE.

Water is essential for sustaining life on Earth though of course it is more than just a chemical compound that can exist in several forms; it affects migration patterns, landforms, and social aspects of human life. Water effects our emotions, our way of living, our geographical choices, how we relate to others, and so much more. No matter where one lives it seems the peak of water worship is summertime, and PRC Nights Online: Water is a time to share work featuring water as the main character.

Stella Johnson‘s current series, Evidence of Life at the Water’s Edge, began in Greece in 2019. When the pandemic clamped down in early March 2020, she sought out bodies of water from Massachusetts to Florida and California where she photographed people gathering in willful pursuit of happiness, “Photographing became a spontaneous and crucial element of my day-to-day survival strategy. During a year of privation, bodies of water offered respite and satisfied my thirst for joy.”

Stella Johnson is a photographer and educator known for her passionate and honest documentary projects. She received a Core Fulbright Scholar Grant to photograph in Mexico in 2003-2004, and Fulbright Specialist grants to teach in Mexico in 2006 and in Colombia in 2018. Johnson taught at Boston University, Boston, MA, from 1999-2018 as a lecturer and has been an adjunct at Lesley University College of Art + Design, Cambridge, MA since 2005. She has led domestic workshops in New York, Maine, and Florida, as well as in Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, Greece, and Israel.  Johnson’s photographs have been widely exhibited in the United States and internationally. Her work is held in public collections including The deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA, The Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, WI, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, The Portland Museum of Art, Maine and The Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach, FL among others.

Ann Prochilo‘s series This is Water is a work in progress inspired by a commencement speech from David Foster Wallace. He shared the story of two fish swimming along who meet an older fish swimming in the opposite direction. The older fish asks “How’s the water, boys?” The two young fish swim on until one of them stops short and asks, “What the hell is water?” This project examines things above and below the surface, shifting mediums and bending light. This is Water seeks to transcend the reality of the subject to illuminate something of simple awareness and the elusive nature of truth. Ann Prochilo is a photographic artist based in Malta and San Francisco. Her narrative-driven photographs explore belonging, memory and change. Prochilo received a BA from Indiana University where she pursued dual interests in fine arts and medicine. She has had a wide-ranging career as midwife, AIDS activist and founder of an advocacy relations agency. After 15 years facilitating productive relationships between patient advocates and pharmaceutical companies, she has returned to a full-time arts practice. Prochilo exhibits nationally and internationally.

Breathe in Water and Aqua Muse, studies of abstract patterns found in water, are two ongoing bodies of work by Sue Michlovitz. “Viewed with an artist’s eye, nature presents abstractions that can motivate meditation and inspire reflection, if only we are alert to seeing them.” The images from these series are created by Nature, not constructed by the artist. For Michlovitz, water is a fertile source of inspiration; she found these images while spending time on bodies of water as far north as East Greenland and as far south as Caribbean Islands. Sue Michlovitz works in photography, book arts, and mixed media. She has shown her photographs at the State of the Art Gallery (Ithaca, NY), Camden Public Library (Camden, ME), Art in the Barn of Cushing Historical Society (Cushing, ME), and Griffin Museum of Photography Lafayette City Center (Boston, Mass), Photoville FENCE 2022 (Winchester, Mass). Sue serves on the Board of Trustees at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA), Rockland, ME and she is a member of the MidCoast Maine Book Arts collective. Michlovitz holds an MFA in Media Arts from Maine Media College, Rockport, ME and a PhD in Orthopaedic Physical Therapy from Hahnemann University (now Drexel University), Philadelphia, PA. She is an internationally renowned physical therapist/hand specialist and educator who provides private consultation and talks to artists and musicians on keeping their hands and arms healthy for their artistic endeavors.

Featuring
Faith Ninivaggi
with Bruce Myren and Andy Ryan

If you are a PRC Member and have work that fits this theme, you are invited to present along with Faith. Email to express your interest and include images (or a URL to see images): jessica.burko@prcboston.org.

Early documentarian Jacob Riis was a journalist and documentary photographer whose work contributed to social reform and exposed a side of life in New York not seen by a large swath of its citizens. Today, whether with professional equipment or iPhone in hand, photographers continue the visual documentary tradition capturing all aspects of contemporary life. The many sub-genres of documentary photography encompasses styles and themes including social documentary, environmental photography, the photo essay, and projects capturing all facets of the human condition. With PRC Nights: Photojournalism and the Documentary Impulse we celebrate the world of documentary photography in all its forms and from all perspectives.

For the past 20 years award-winning photographer Faith Ninivaggi has documented major news events, pro sports, feature stories and political figures as a photojournalist for the Boston Herald, and she is a contributing freelance photographer for Reuters. Her work photographing during the pandemic in collaboration with the creative team at WCVB, earned her a New England Emmy Award. Over the past two decades, Faith has run her own freelance business photographing portrait, editorial and commercial commissions for local and national corporations. She holds a BFA in Photography from The Art Institute of Boston and recently received her MFA in Photography + Integrated media from Lesley University. Faith’s point of view as an artist and documentarian is informed by the duality of her own life as a mother and photojournalist. She has an acute commitment to photograph her subjects with sensitivity and grace, and deeply feels the inherent responsibility to both the visual, and emotional truth. Her genuine interest in our cultural and social landscape leads her to focus her intimate portraits on how we wear the life events that the world imposes on all of us. As a mother, she understands empathy and trust. As a strong storyteller whose refined humanist vision resulted from years in the field as a photojournalist, her work embodies and memorializes the human experience.

Bruce Myren‘s “The Washington Elm” project documents the tree under which George Washington allegedly took command of the Continental Army in Cambridge, MA in 1775. These images are the first in a larger undertaking that considers the role elm trees have played in the history and civic life of American cities. The overarching series, entitled “The Fate of the Elms” taken from a poem by Robert Francis, includes the Elm, other scions or clones, and artifacts from around the country. By beginning with one tree, which is itself not the original, Myren invites the viewer to consider how history is represented and memorialized within the built environment and via connections to the natural world. Bruce Myren holds a BFA from MassArt and an MFA from the UConn. His work has been featured in Fraction Magazine, afterimage, and View Camera Magazine and been in group exhibitions at the Phoenix Art Museum, RISD Museum, Houston Center of Photography, and the William Benton Museum of Art. The recipient of a Cambridge Arts Council Grant, he has had solo shows at the University of the Arts, Danforth Museum of Art, and Gallery Kayafas. He has presented his work at the College Art Association and the Society for Photographic Education. Currently, Myren owns Bee Digital Lab and works at the Boston Public Library.

Andy Ryan’s photographic career is best described by one word: metamorphosis. Ryan’s striking and serene images document China’s profound transformation and seismic political and economic development.  His practice is to do so simply as a “Witness” with as little intrusion into the moment as possible. Beginning with a courier flight to China in 1989 for a five-week exploratory trip, Ryan left his job photographing the Central Artery 3rd tunnel Harbor Tunnel Project in Boston. Landing in Tiananmen Square he became an unwitting, eyewitness photojournalist, feeding images from the crackdown to NBC news. Continuing to work as a documentarian, Ryan documented civilian life in Post Desert Storm Iraq in 1991 & 1996 exhibited in 1993 at the Spectrum Gallery.

Featuring Shelby Meyerhoff with Julie Mihaly, and Jürgen Lobert

Early photographers earned reputations for creating documents of truth, however photographers have also long played with those assumption. The practice of fabricating or constructing the subject of a photograph challenges the relationship between photography and the truth while allowing for the building of new narratives. Staged images change the approach to image making in direct opposition to the methods of candid and documentary genres, the constructed image depends on artifice and invention to create or manipulate the subject.

Shelby Meyerhoff is the featured photographer for PRC Nights Online: The Staged Photograph. In her Zoomorphics series, Meyerhoff transforms herself into creatures inspired by the natural world. Her process incorporates painting, performance, and photography. The resulting images challenge traditional dichotomies, including male/female and human/animal. Meyerhoff is a multidisciplinary artist based in the Boston area. She had her first solo show, Zoomorphics, at the Griffin Museum of Photography (MA) in 2020. Her work has been exhibited at venues across the country, including the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (GA), the Attleboro Arts Museum (MA), the Mattatuck Museum (CT), and the LH Horton Jr. Gallery at San Joaquin Delta College (CA). Upcoming shows include a solo show at the Concord Free Public Library (MA) and a two-person show at the Hopkins Center for the Arts (MN). Zoomorphics has been featured in Harvard Magazine, Fraction Magazine, A Photo Editor, and UU World.

Julie Mihaly attended Vassar College before earning a BFA and MFA in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. After teaching photography at NYC’s School of Visual Arts, and Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University, Mihaly contributed her talents as a photo director, editor and researcher to magazines such as Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly and Garden Design. She also wrote for Martha Stewart Living, Budget Living and Organic Style before returning to the full-time pursuit of her own photography. Mihaly has had a number of solo exhibitions and her work has been included in numerous invitational and juried exhibits. Eight books of Julie Mihaly’s photographs have been published. She currently lives & works in New York’s Hudson River Valley.

Her series, When We Weren’t Watching, is all about narrative, action & questions. What in the Sam Hill have these characters/items been up to while we’ve been distracted by daily life or REM sleep or the gazillion things that demand our attention every day. The pix images are little secret peeks into scenarios that we just haven’t taken the time to see. They may or may not exist in “real life,” but almost they do their best to imply or depict some sort of action.

Jürgen Lobert is a Massachusetts-based fine art photographer and educator, born and raised in Germany. He received a Ph.D. in atmospheric
chemistry from Gutenberg University in Mainz before moving to the US in 1991. Jürgen is fortunate to have a daytime job, so he was forced to specialize mostly in night photography. However, he also creates daytime long exposure, urban exploration and infrared imagery. In February 2022, Jürgen had a solo exhibit, Infralucent Clouds, at the Griffin
Museum of Photography @WinCam. Jürgen’s work has appeared in numerous group shows and he has organized, curated and exhibited shows in Massachusetts. Among those shows were the Night Becomes Us exhibit at the Art Complex Museum. His artwork is in the permanent collection of the Art Complex Museum, Duxbury MA and private collectors. Jürgen is a Master Member of the New England Camera Club Council (MNEC), an executive member of the Boston Camera Club and the founder and organizer of the Greater Boston Night Photographers Meetup group.

Featuring Bremner Benedict, Skip Schiel, and Jonathan Sharlin

Despite solid scientific evidence, the public continues to debate the truth surrounding climate change and there are large groups that have yet to fully accept the declining state of the global environment and the human hand in creating it. As the climate crisis becomes more urgent, the role of photography has a growing impact on raising awareness. PRC Nights Online: Photographing Climate Change, is an opportunity to view images and discuss projects by PRC Member photographers that explore the landscape of climate change and its global impact.

Featured presenter, Bremner Benedict, will show work from her Hidden Waters series, Drylands Springs In The West. For the past several years Benedict been photographing in the five major deserts of North America as they run out of water, focusing on the effects of climate change, drought and aquifer overuse. Of her work Benedict says, “My intent is to create an historical record of keystone ecosystems before they are lost forever; to start a dialogue and to serve as a call to action since the loss of these biologically diverse, ecologically significant, and culturally important ecosystems would threaten our survival to live in dry places.”

Jonathan Sharlin‘s series, Broken Earth, is a chronicle of his immediate environment. He photographs local landscapes and those he encounters while traveling, depicting the land disintegrating and falling apart as the earth is changing with unusual storms, severe flooding, and disruptions caused by humankind. In his observations of the natural progression of life and transitions of time he observes repeated cycles and is noticing the cycles changing, and the changes are happening more quickly. Broken Earth is Sharlin’s photographic note-taking of the phenomenon.

Skip Schiel is a socially engaged participatory photographer with two primary current projects, “Ways to Address the Climate Crisis,” and “The Ongoing and Relentless Nakba,” about Palestinian refugees in the West Bank and their erased homelands in Israel. His work, Simply Earth, depicts how the earth feels to him through his lens. He tells the visual story in three parts: personal spirits or essences of the earth, a tragic story about an elm tree, and strategic, risky, and often colorful actions to address the climate crisis.

Climate photography helps to make visceral what can only be imagined by those not directly being affected. Through still images and film, photographers chronicle how climate change is altering communities and regions by imaging scenes of drought, deforestation, disappearing glaciers, pollution from fossil fuel extraction, desertification, and extreme temperatures. To attend this free online event register HERE.

Click HERE to view a recording of this event.

The first still lifes can be traced back to ancient Egyptian funerary paintings discovered in burial sites, and continued in popularity during the Middle Ages when the style was used for religious purposes. During the Northern Renaissance artists grew increasingly interested in creating realistic studies of everyday items and in the 19th century still life featured prominently in the experiments of photography inventors Jacques-Louis-Mandé Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot. They did this in part, for practical reasons: the exceptionally long exposure times of their processes precluded the use of living models. Photographers of today continue exploring the genre with in its many forms.

Vaughn Sills, our featured presenter in PRC Nights: Still Life, continues the long tradition with her romantic floral arrangements perched in front of landscape imagery. Her photographs have been shown at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Gibbes Museum in Charleston SC, the DuSables Museum of African American History in Chicago. Vaughn is represented by the Kingston Gallery and Ellen Miller Gallery; and her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, DeCordova Museum, Harvard Art Museum, Simmons University, and the Fidelity and Eaton Vance Collections.

David Weinberg received his B.A. from Temple University in 1971, and M.D. and Ph.D. degrees in 1977 from New York University School of Medicine. Following his residency and research fellowship, Dr. Weinberg served as a staff pathologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Associate Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School. Upon retiring from a thirty-year career in academic medicine David pursued a second career, completing a certificate program in professional photography at Boston University in 2006. He has exhibited his fine art photography in galleries in New York City and Boston, and has participated in many national juried shows. David is currently the President of the Danforth Art Alliance, and is a member of the board of directors of the Framingham University Foundation, serving on the Danforth Museum Advisory Board, the Danforth Museum Collections Committee, and the FSU Foundation Finance Committee. He is a resident of Brookline, Massachusetts.

A poet, literary scholar and cultural critic with a keen interest in visual culture, Peter Nohrnberg has been taking, developing, and printing photographs since his early teens. Over the years his work has been displayed in a diverse set of venues, including the Albemarle County Fair, Oxford’s Magdalen College, the Worcester Arts Center, and the Visura.co web platform.  In the past he has shared both a portfolio of landscape photography and one of family portraits with members of the Boston Photographic Resource Center.  His experiments in creating photographic still lives derives from his fascination with the historical connections between photography and painting as well as the more phenomenological aspects of photography as an art of both presence and absence.