Photography

Artist Statement

“There is often a commonality in what we think of as our individual past. As a lens- based artist, I seek to reposition my past as an operative with a broader context. In exploring its impact, both active and benign, memory becomes metaphorical and ritualistic. I strive for my images and assemblages to provoke, engage, and inform a universal memory with influences of contemporary life. These new works referencing strength are influenced by the interconnectedness of the natural world.”

Artist Bio

Barbara Snyder is a self-educated lens-based artist, working with digital, film and alternative processes. She has shown nationally and internationally and was a recipient of the 2014 and 2017 North Carolina Regional Artists Grant. Snyder lives and works in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Some of the Curtis Krueger’s earliest memories are of his father and him drawing at the dining room table. He was told our television broke down when he was in kindergarten, and his parents, although they could afford to repair it decided not to.  Curtis places much of his fascination with the art-world with their encouragement and direct participation. The lack of television as entertainment is another. Curtis studied art at Eastern Michigan University, earning a BFA, along with two teaching certificates. It was in school where he took a darkroom class and got the incurable photo bug.  For the last 25 years he has earned a living selling my photos at various art festivals and galleries across America. Traveling is a big part of his schedule. Half the year is taken up with either shows or photo gathering trips. On an average year, Curtis travels 30,000 miles and shoots 50,000 images.

Wm. Fridrich: Photographs

Robert Hughes, referring to the DADA move­ment (and Marcel Duchamp in particular), said that “like his Bottle Rack, Bicycle Wheel and other ‘ready­mades’…the world is so full of interesting objects that the artist need not add to them. Instead he could just pick one, and this ironic act of choice was equivalent to creation.”

The camera is the definitive instrument for making these ironic acts of choice. Then the function of this device — to record what already exists — in the DADA belief, is equivalent to the act of creation.

Wm. Fridrich studied art, sculpture and photography at UCLA, motorcycle magazines and in the U.S. Army, as a combat illustrator. He then launched a successful graphic design career in the early 1970s.

Introduced to the Dada and Surrealist movements by his wife, art historian Marsha McKee, William became clinically obsessed with Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Joseph Cornell: he has not yet recovered.

More of his work can be found on his WEBSITE.

“I’ve been a photojournalist, commercial photographer and art photographer for more than 35 years. The overall theme of my art images could be described as “ordinary beauty, closely observed.” These images are often from nature and although they are focused on still life subjects, there is a dynamic sense of movement and emotionalism in them. In recent years I’ve been playing around with scanning objects, as opposed to photographing them, creating “scanographs. Scanography is a process of image capture using a flatbed scanner as the image capturing device. I work from nature, scanning live flowers, etc. I then print out the resulting digital images on high quality, archival photo paper.”

Susan lives and works in Wilmington.

A friend of mine, a world renowned doctor of pharmacology, once asked me a question with regards to my artistic photography; “What is your purpose?“. For decades, I have tried to understand, answer and pursue what that purpose has been. To visually see my feelings in images, that represent myself as a child and young adult, has given me a  better connection, a deeper understanding, and a clearer meaning  in my personal life. Even as I have become a photography dinosaur, still working in my “chemical darkroom” and still using film for all of my artistic work, I continue to seek images that represent and connect with my heart and soul. Making prints that emit light from the silver they are made from is as important today as it ever was in this digital age of ink and sensors. After being given clear guidance by a great teacher about creating art with my photography, my artistic quest to find wonderful images has never ceased and to this day remains amazingly strong. Currently, I teach a class in Artistic Photography at Brunswick Community College, where I encourage my students to connect with who they are through their photography and I too continue to ask them the same question; What is YOUR purpose?

Artist statement

Art is an expression of passion and creativity. As artistic photographers, allowing ourselves to open up and feel this passion and creative flow ties our art to who we are and what we see. This produces images that represent our emotions, our dreams, our fears and our life experiences.

When photographing, the focus is on a different kind of place than our own reality or existence. We try to connect with a place that we figuratively can’t see. It’s a world of sensing a presence, an entity that defies description. As artists, we are compelled to understand how to connect with this feeling and then follow and photograph it. We are driven to find the source, its power. When we do connect, there is a brightness far more brilliant than anything in this world and possesses a feeling like a river of water flowing through our soul. This is a love that can bring us to tears and soothe all of our fears, stresses and anxieties. It’s a moment of discovery that creates a calming like no other; your soul is at rest!

Then, in the very next moment, everything changes and another excitement comes. Although there is literally nothing there that embodies this feeling, an energy courses through our veins with a rush of adrenaline that literally leaves us breathless, yearning and hoping to just take one more wonderful image.

We have seen and taken a photograph that reaches us on an emotional level, a moment that touches us deeply and profoundly. This is the true language of artistic photography.