Leslie Bastress
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In an ever increasingly sterilizing high tech world fed by a rushed and competitive culture expectant of instant gratifications, I find myself taking a more purposeful, albeit slower, path in life. I take refuge in the lay of the land; the slow moving seasons; the distance between breaths; lingering moments of contemplation, wonder, joy, doubt, sorrow and regret. I relish in what is heartfelt and handmade. By employing vintage equipment and alternative processes, I allow myself the time and space for a purposeful path to unfold.

Heather Blakney
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My photographs represent the craziness we see everyday in our lives. Some are shots of places that are special to me, but those are taken from a point that few people see those places from. Others are simply shots of commonplace items, but, again, those shots are taken from a different perspective than most people see. I often wonder what others see when they look at simple things like a clock or street-sign... Tell me, what do you see?
Do you see a clock, or the time you have left to enjoy your life? Epiphany? Memories? Choice? Tell me, what do you see?

Kayla Brenes
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Well, when I took this photograph, I was backtracking the times when I started going to church. I began as a young child, at about the age of 6 years. When I walked by this church with the playground I began thinking about the times I first started going to church and how I enjoyed it so much. In the bible, Jesus says that you must be like a child in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. I think that it’s great for a child to be raised with some religious belief. And I thought that it was wonderful that the church had a playground because it gives children some sort of foundation with belief.

Mark Richard Brown
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Mark Brown has been making pinhole cameras and photographs for more than 30 years. His principal photographic interests are landscapes and urban spaces.

“I like the simplicity of pinhole cameras – capturing some reflected light through a hole in a box to create a replica of a complex scene. The resulting image is a simple object, but it elicits complex meanings and interpretations.”

The image ‘Floating’ is a multiple exposure made in a pinhole camera of my own design and construction. This camera allows me to merge multiple images on the negative at the time of exposure. It allows me to combine multiple perspectives, and disparate images to create dream-like scenes. “Floating” is two overlapping exposures composed inside the camera (not digitally composited in the computer). I develop my own negatives, scan them, and do cropping, spotting and make the printing adjustments in the computer. I make the prints on an inkjet printer using archival (Ultrachrome) inks.

Derrick Burbul
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My Myths of the West series simultaneously celebrates and mourns the transformation of the western landscape. It mourns the loss of biodiversity while celebrating the determination of the pioneers to transform this environment into a land of plenty. The subjects of these images are kitschy representations of western icons: stage coaches, buffalo, teepees and the like. The process is the tintype process. I shoot for irony as I focus this photographic process that creates one-of-a-kind images on objects that were once sentient beings and useful tools and are now mere decoration.

Christina
This picture is a double exposure. I was experimenting with a pinhole camera and I came upon a setting of images I liked. So I took this double exposure of myself and friends in my dining room, then without people. I figured that I would have another black picture but it came out ghost like. This is the abstraction of my life. Me as a ghost in my family's mind and my program a blur in my world of art!

Myriah Leshea Douglas
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Pinhole photography makes me realize the little things in life. I love photography and pinhole photography, because I know I have an eye for them and photography is a way of releasing tension for me. This picture represents where I live. I took a oatmeal can camera and I put it in the bush so that it could take a picture of what the pinhole could see. What the pinhole sees is the branches, and when the sunlight hits the paper it bends the bushes and the nun’s chapel.

Erica Frisk
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This picture, taken with a plastic camera records the raw animalistic nature of the image. Taken in Rhode Island at a local horse stable, this diptych abstracts the space in which the horse floats and creates a subtle yet apparent comment how composition dictates the reading of an image. Working in alternative processes, the artist must be open to issues of control. We are never quite sure how the result will look, instead leaving the process of our work to the notion chance, and we are open to the possibility of "happy accidents" that simultaneously occur with our original intention.

Alice Grossman
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While traveling in the Dominican Republic, photographing what I saw from a moving car with a plastic camera helped me feel less like a predatory “ugly American” tourista and more like a storyteller.

Mellisa Gruntkosky
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My passion for toy cameras began when digital photography came into being the norm. My excitement when picking up a newly developed roll of film and investigating the uncontrollable results of an image captured with a toy camera is unmatched to anything a digital medium could attempt to replicate. The light leaks, color shifts, vignetting, and happy accidents all fuel my passion for using toy cameras. Each exposure is a unique perspective sometimes impossible to replicate.

Last summer I went out West to many of our country's national parks and chose to bring my Holga with me. The images I took were experiments in capturing the rich and unique colors, shapes, and textures found in the landscapes of the west. Always approaching a potential shot with a sense of humor I also looked to capture images of the landscape out that had unexpected and sometimes other worldly elements.

Janisha
I hate the light. I love taking pictures but if the flash is on I won’t want to take it.

I don’t like things that are too shiny, unless it’s a diamond (just kidding). That day, I thought it was too bright out, and I didn’t want to be outside. But the only way I could take the picture was if it was bright out. I hate the picture, but I like it because it’s so abstract. I see spiders. I like this picture because I like ‘I Spy.’

Theresa Kelliher
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Toy cameras for me are all about ease of use and the element of surprise. The ease makes it the perfect lazy summer medium. The element of surprise is twofold: the toy camera is unpredictable in its output, and film denies the immediate gratification provided by digital. It is a reminder that patience is still a virtue. From the "Plum Island" series.

Ariel Kessler
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When I was eleven, my father died and I inherited all of his photographs, negatives and slides. When my fathers' mother and father died (two months apart) nine years later, I inherited their photographs, negatives and slides. As the youngest one in my family, and as a collector of anything and everything, I realized that it was my responsibility to hold on to all I was given so our family history will be passed on to further generations.

Because of the Polaroid transfer process, the imperfections are what can make the image. Many of the slides I use to make the transfers were taken in places I don't know about, or of people I have never met, and with little information and no one to really ask. I was able to construct my own family history and visually write my own stories. The process of Polaroid transfers is a very uncontrolled rush; the surprise and imperfections in the emulsion are what makes working with film in general a more exc iting process for me than digital.

Mary Kocol
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My fascination with the toy camera began in grad school in the late 1980’s when a friend gave the gift of a “Sunpet” toy camera. Soon
after, I discovered the Diana camera, and its relatives, and have been photographing with it ever since. These cameras bring back memories of my first childhood camera: the Kodak “Keystone” a 126-drop in cartridge camera with a flash cube on top, purchased with a fist full
of Green Stamps when I was seven.

This series of photographs represent the brevity of a spring moment. They’re meditations on ephemeral light, an exquisite landscape, or a
flowering branch within my urban midst. Trees look their most glorious in the spring when they explode with color and delicate blossoms. They provide a welcome rest and a visual break from the congestion of city living. These places were found by chance while walking in a
neighborhood, or visiting botanical gardens, parks, and arboretums within several cities. The “Rain House” was made while sitting in the
car watching rain pour onto the windshield.

Although the toy camera may be humorous or quirky to use, I’ve come to respect it as a valid picture-making tool. I like how the plastic
lens interprets light: halos and spectrums of color and soft luminous glare. Emerging out of a vignetted darkness, the image appears as if
radiating from the center of the picture. It reminds me of seeing with my glasses off: a soft focus world with pointelles of light and vague shapes of color, an imperfect image.

Cassandra Martin
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When I first started pinhole photography I thought it was going to be boring. By the second week of it I was always excited to take pictures. I love to take pictures I guess it’s just in my nature. I love doing pinhole and it inspired me to take pictures of nature and other interesting things and make a scrap book out of the photos.

Karen Molloy
My work draws inspiration from the textures and rhythms of urban patterns, architectural motifs, and remnants of urban decay. I live
and work in Somerville, where I have been a resident for 22 years. I am greatly attracted to the physicality and intimacy of viewing the
book form. The prints in this artists' book are made with the vintage cyanotype photo-printing technique, which enables me to combine
different kinds of marks, textures, and fragments from my original photographs on a single surface. I expose my cyanotypes outdoors in
the sunlight and enjoy the connection of working with the sun.

Natasha Moustache
The Sky's the Limit is one of a series of Holga double exposure photographs in which I was experimenting with seeing nature in a new way; with the "third eye". With the Holga camera, the resultant photograph, although executed purposefully, is always somewhat of a surprise. Sometimes the photograph is more an inner view of nature, how one wishes one could see nature. The exhibited photgraph was shot in the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain

Dana Mueller
On Memory from the series Heimat Land Narratives

The series of photographs of landscapes seek to document what remains of the past. The photographs, taken in the US are a response to, rather than a narration of, history. In the past three years I have been interested in what has happened when Germans occupied a landscape: living, working, marching, killing, dying, or surviving within the context of human experiences. For my work in Massachusetts and New Hampshire I have focused on former German prisoner of war camps at Ft. Devens, Camp Edwards, Stark, NH, and surrounding areas where prisoners were put to work during their imprisonment.

As a German, national identity has often been shaped by our sense of cultural heritage only, such as architectural monuments, the arts, social custom, and other public expressions of German character. However, in past decades since the war, there has been an effort to acknowledge the reality of our collective guilt and experiences in the post war period through a process of storing and categorizing facts in museums, archives, books, and films. But what is our understanding today of the individual experiences of anyone who goes through war? Do we truly understand, collectively, what it means to the individual to be perpetrator, victim, or both?

The limitations of preservation in the end are also the limitation of the photograph; its inability to fully describe, capture or narrate emphasizes the absence of what might otherwise be identified. Often, it is what we cannot see that perpetuates our desire to understand. We desperately seek to understand by looking intensely, by penetrating the image, thinking, eventually we will see and we will understand. The potential of recognition is why these photographs were made.

Denyse Murphy
Cyanotype is a rudimentary form of photography, in which paper is coated with a sensitizer, and then exposed to sunlight. The interaction between chemistry and light leaves a characteristic, indelible blue stain on the paper. Cyanotype images are ghosts, they are trace elements of a body or form that is no longer present. Remnants of a physical object that has come into contact with the paper for a brief period of time , and then left. That is one of the reasons why I work with it, because it is more tactile than conventional photography, and collapses the distance between subject and object. I will usually lie down on a sheet of clear plastic placed on top of the paper. Sometimes I use the image of my body as skeleton, or starting point to paint into. At present, I am exploring the concept of “self” and how we associate who we are with our physical form.

Eric Nichols
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Nothing lasts forever… however a photograph is an attempt to preserve a moment in time. The materials used to suspend this moment time are subject to the same decay as the subject matter photographed. This body of work, through the careful manipulation and deconstruction of the negatives, show a forced premature aging. While the prints themselves are silver gelatin; the handling of the materials up until the printing process is anything but conventional. The crude way I handle the negatives instills a sense of time and deconstruction creeping in towards the preserved and delicate forms of the flowers. This alternative way of handling the negatives prior to printing is a complete contradiction to the archival preservation of negatives and prints so commonly sought after by photographers. As the negative is pressed in between two pieces of glass, the brittle negatives continue to crack and small pieces of the negative is sometimes lost. This fragility caused by the burnt, crumbling and warped state of the negatives guarantees that no two printing sessions will yield identical prints. However the quickly deteriorating state of these negatives also give them a limited life span symbolic of the cut flowers these negatives contain.

Cade Overton
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Polaroids always feel like memories. It is the perfect film for nostalgia, a little instant square that provides the colors of romantic hindsight. When I shoot Polaroids I always save them for the scenes that remind me of something good; in this case, being at home. I took these photographs in places where I grew up, places that had specific people, events, and memories associated with them.

O Gustavo Plascencia
Remembering is basically reinventing the past; everyone has a point of view on how history happened. I explore the construction and interactions of cultures and their respective subcultures. With the help of Mexican Catholic iconography, which blends traditional native religious rituals and deities with Roman Catholicism, I present stories based on systematic repetition of rituals, idealized representations of acts, and norms reconstructed by memory. It would be easy to categorize people, but when you start to consider the ethnic background, social class, religion, gender, family, values, ethics, and so on, everything gets more complicated, and you cannot separate one identity from the rest { all of them coexist and interact with each other. Such dilemmas and situations are presented in my artwork, and explored through mystic, ritualistic, and historical references and imagery commenting on acculturation, religion, gender, social strains, and injustices { all set on a colonial environment presented in a modern context.

Serrah Russell
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Clothing contains a tension of absence and presence that fascinates me. When the clothing is removed from the body, it brings about thoughts of the absence of the human body that would traditionally encompass the now empty spaces and vacuums. A nude figure, whether in physical form or in the lines of a drawing, holds the interest that it does because it reveals that which is traditionally concealed. The physicality of the Polaroid transfers imitates the creases and folds found naturally within the body and fabric. Dress can be representative of human identity; this is especially poignant for women. I attempt to convey the feeling of anonymity and insignificance that can occur with women when their identity is seen only as outward appearance.

Shayna
When I took this picture I was simply thinking about the reaction that some people have when they enter inside a church . The thought that they had was “will they judge me on my actions or my persona?” Most people don’t like going to church because they’re afraid that the church goers will judge them based on their past. While taking a picture of it I decided to capture the churches beauties and evil’s at the same time .

Erika Sidor
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Dogs at play are exhuberant, combative, and uninhibited. The do all the things pack animals will do...despite the fact that these are not wild dogs, but our own pampered pets, perfect to us in every way- great dogs! So friendly! When the dogs start playing, though, the humans become insignificant...almost invisible. Everything is probably as raw and honest as it can get. Certain dogs will be dominant, others fearful, and others joyfully brainless. They sniff butts, circle each other with aprehension, and body language signifies how the interaction shall proceed. Running, peeing, humping, biting, licking, and sharing time and space for awhile are the things that make up the world of the unofficial dog park where I photograph.

Rarely do I look thru the camera (Holgas) to take my photos. I have learned from experience that pre-focussing, instinctive aiming, and timing the shot well is what's needed. For each camera that I load, I get only 12 shots. Taking the time between shots to roll the film to the next position takes just seconds, but in the fast paced world of the dogs at play, it is an eternity. This project has spanned 2 years now, and it is something I look forward to every week...shooting, developing, scanning negs. It is a body of work that I am very proud of.

Annie Smidt
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Having worked in both new-tech (graphic design, digital photography) and old-tech (oil, watercolor, pen and ink, printmaking) media, in the past 5 years I’ve become delighted and fascinated by a form which merges old and new: medium-format photography accomplished with home-made pinhole cameras, vintage plastic toy cameras and modified old cameras culminating in digitally-produced prints. These light, inexpensive toy and outmoded cameras are perfect for travel – be it to unusual locales or in the immediate neighborhood’s less-explored corners. The pictures shown here represent five different journeys with plastic camera in hand.

Of course, the camera technology (or refreshing lack thereof) only plays a supporting role. Wherever I’ve gone in recent years, I’ve had a camera or two with me. It is the unequivocal beauty and inexorable wonders of the world that star. These photos were often made while getting lost following a ray of light or a spectacular bevy of clouds. I love that having a camera in my hand will drive me always to explore a little further down an empty beach, meandering path or other roads less travelled in search of the perfect piece of space in time to capture and share.

These images turn deliberately away from presenting reality in a direct, one-to-one representational fashion. In lieu of the crisp ultra-realism of much modern photography, I have purposely sought color-shifts, extreme graininess, soft edges and vignetted images. I often shoot right into the sun, or break other basic “rules”. These aesthetic choices mirror the way the world often feels to me – especially in moments of inspiration, in times when the beauty overwhelms all else – changeable and not quite cut and dry.

Roberta Stone
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[Statement is not yet available]

David Strasburger
I look out through a friend's kitchen window at his back yard in Somerville, where the carriage house is visible through spring snow. My friend's ex-lover has lived there, for ten years, just across the flower garden. He is moving out this week. What has it been like, I wonder, to wash dishes for ten years looking at Jonathan’s windows? And what different sort of loss is it now as Jonathan leaves in this new and more decisive way? I can’t properly frame the question to my friend at the time; instead I make a photo.

The more intractable dilemma is the question of why, beyond empathy for my friend, this view is so important and alive to me. These images come from problems or puzzles; they become a way of wrestling with questions, or even posing questions that I can’t quite frame in any way other than with a photograph. I come from a family that is all about words. In my childhood the cookbooks were mixed on the kitchen shelf with dictionaries, an encyclopedia, and an atlas so we wouldn’t have to run to the living room to settle one of our routine dinner table arguments. If my upbringing was intensely verbal and figurative then my academic training, in physics, was intensely quantitative and formal. But there are questions and ideas that don’t yield well either to words or numbers. And that’s why I make photographs. I make them as meditations, particularly on questions about people I am close to. Each image in this body of work has within it a story in which truths
intertwine with questions, questions that might collapse under their own weight if asked outright. So the photo can be a way of talking around a question, circling it, stalking it, being patient with it, maybe not looking it full in the face until much later. The passage of time is important for these images; they function as the scaffolding for long-term inquiry and reflection. Time's flow is also encompassed within each multi-panel composite, assembled from separate moments and perspectives. Intimacy develops in a similar way, from the accretion of single instants and interactions over time.

The portfolio is printed in nineteenth-century handmade processes, kallitype and platinum/palladium. I print this way because I see a symmetry between the experience of the viewer and the maker of such prints. The making process, the reification of image, is painstaking
and intimate and requires an ongoing relationship with the physical materials: raw paper and sensitizing chemistry. The small contact prints and delicate tonal scale are similarly demanding of a viewer; engaging this material requires an investment of time and attention.
Suppose you stuck a branch upright in the earth and then every day, at the exact same time of day, you checked the shadow it cast and marked the ground at the shadow's tip. If you did this for a full year the marks would trace out an elongated and asymmetrical figure
eight. This figure is called an analemma. Its shape reflects the seasonal changes in the earth’s relationship to the sun: we slowly approach or gently pull away, we tilt our axis to one side or the other. At times during this project I have traveled across the country to
photograph in the house of a friend, sometimes one I haven’t seen for years. We circle back, passing one another, maybe closer than the last time, maybe not. The slow paths we trace out with respect to each other are mediated by our histories and the pull of the other people in our lives. Ultimately these photographs aim to investigate and document the gentle variations in those paths.

Andy Takats
A plastic holga seemed the appropriate technology for capturing the beautiful chaos and imperfect nature of India.
I took this photograph early morning one day in December, 2006, at the main gate of the 17th century Red Fort in Old Delhi. I'd already been up and around for many hours with my driver, who had been genuinely puzzled at my interest in photographing a wholesale flower market (supposedly the world's largest) at 6:30 am. After he'd dropped me at the Fort for an hour visit, I was surprised and pleased when he found me 10 minutes later in line to enter. He joined me for a walk inside the massive complex -- he'd never seen it either.

That morning there was a bit of a yellow haze in the air that seemed to tint the fort itself. To match that memory I accentuated the yellow a bit in this print. Enjoy and visit India when you can!

Tricia
I like this picture because it shows happiness and it shows houses around the community and that they’re shaped the same size. It shows houses that have the same perspective.

It makes me think happy thoughts, that someday I want to get a house. I think pinhole photography is really fun. It’s fun because you get to take pictures and you get to go in a darkroom where you develop your pictures. You have to figure out the right time, and it’s about estimating the time of how long you want to leave your picture out for. You figure out where you want your picture – you don’t want it too dark or too light. This is different because I’ve never been in a darkroom and worked with chemicals. You wouldn’t expect pictures to be like that. You‘d expect them to be developed in a different way – they’d just go through a machine and automatically get developed. My favorite part is developing them, because you get to see every step of how it becomes a picture, and putting them into each tray and seeing each section become a picture at the end. It’s cool.

M. L. Van Nice
This image are digital scans of film prints taken with a Holga toy camera. I taped a child’s plastic prism to the Holga lens to get the multi-facet effect. Each print is 8 inches square, and each picture was taken from my studio—door or window--in Somerville.

V Van Sant
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My obsession with Polaroids started the first time I held an XS-70 camera and watched the first shot spit out.

I got the idea for the piece "Intermission" back in 1984 and the piece was finished and displayed for the first time in 1994. Between the cost of the film (a buck a shot!) and time it took to gather "The Ends" from old movies, it took me 10 years from conception to finished piece! Sadly now with the demise of the SX-70, Polaroid cameras and film this piece takes on a new meaning.

"Intermission" consists of 7 "panels" of Polaroid pictures. Each panel has 70 pictures, for a total of 490 Polaroid pictures from an SX 70 camera.
The other works I have included take Polaroids that are rejects, scribbled on and scratched into combined to make small tapestries. I do feel like I "painted" with Polaroids.

Ann Zelle
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[Statement is not yet available]

Lexie Zippin
This was the first time I had ever taken a picture without a digital camera that does almost all the work for you. I thought it was so amazing to take a picture with an oatmeal box or film canister and having the end result being an amazing picture.