Excerpted from "Tradition Meets Innovation In Postmodern Photography", 'Gallery & Studio' magazine, April/May2007, by: Maureen Flynn
". . . Painterly qualities also come into play in Louisiana resident Eleanor Owen Kerr's poetic topographical views of land masses and waterways, with their dramatic shadowplay and luminous reflections. Seeking the landscape's 'mysterious, hidden depths', Kerr exerts control over the subtle tonal modulations..."
Excerpted from "Photography's Hot at Fraser's Competition Show", by Claudia Rousseau, Bethesda Gazette, March 29, 2006
The fourth annual Bethesda International Photography Competition coincided
with the publication of a national art magazine cover that features the
headline ‘‘Photography: What’s Hot” — both
a question and a statement.
What is hot in photography these days? Art photography is more popular
than ever. Collectors are willing to spend large sums, more than a million
dollars in a recent auction, on individual prints. A look at the work of
the competition winners now at the Fraser Gallery in Bethesda also indicates
that traditional photography is still healthy — despite Kodak’s
2005 announcement that it would no longer manufacture black and white printing
papers. Indeed, it looks like this industrial benchmark is neither spelling
the demise of traditional photography nor rendering old-fashioned the look
of black and white prints made from film negatives. Much to the contrary,
while many have been saying that photography’s future is not in the
darkroom, traditional black and white prints still dominate the market
for collectors who balk at digital prints of any kind. Yet, although the
deep tonal look of a gelatin silver print currently cannot be matched digitally,
digital results do keep getting more interesting.
However you look at it, while the pendulum of taste is always swinging,
it seems that older modernist aesthetics are again on the rise — away
from the big, cool, digitally enhanced color prints of the past decade,
and reaffirming something fundamental in traditional photography that refuses
to lose its appeal. . .
. . .David Ashman’s front steps and doorway in ‘‘Cathedral
Street, No. 3” and Eleanor Owen Kerr’s view of a bayou in ‘‘Before
the Storm: New Orleans” show that crisp depth of tone, especially
in the blacks, that can be achieved only with the black and white gelatin
silver print technique. Both these works, with their topographical approach,
are in sync with the rising taste for images that not only have that kind
of depth, but also achieve a sort of intimacy without seeming staged.