Upcoming KCC Art Center Focus on Photography
Photography, at first, may seem to be a solitary pursuit. There is one set of hands on the camera. There is one eye seeking its subject through the viewfinder. Two events in Battle Creek, though, will shed light on the hobby, profession and art form and show that photography is a communal activity.
Running through March 25, Kellogg Community College's DeVries Gallery will host the Professional Photographers Invitational. At the Art Center of Battle Creek, Battle Creek native and Washington, D.C.-based photojournalist Lowell McGinnis will have his work displayed in an exhibit entitled "DC to BC." The exhibit will run until Feb. 25.
Both, in their way, speak to how photography involves more than a single photographer.
KCC photography instructor and DeVries Gallery Director Ryan Flathau said one of the goals of not only the invitational, but also of the school's program in general, is to cultivate students who are interested and capable of working the photography industry. They can join the public in viewing the work of area photographers and seeing how the professionals do it.
"Also, it's a lifestyle," Flathau said. "It's more than just a job or a profession."
Tom Brayne is a KCC adjunct instructor, a professional photographer based in Kalamazoo and invitational participant. His work will be quite different than the matter-of-fact flavor he gives subjects in his regular work shooting corporate and advertising pieces.
Brayne's pieces at the exhibit will show somewhat haunting, desolate locations. The outdoor scenes he will feature were taken during the day, but the negative, black and white prints give an eerie nighttime feel to them. A shot of an Underground Railroad museum, located in a rural trailer home near Vandalia, takes on a foreboding atmosphere in Brayne's piece.
"Ages ago, when there was this odd thing called film, I shot black and white film," Brayne said. "I don't want to be trite and say it's magical, but there's something I find really appealing about being able to see something that's not revealed to human vision."
Brayne came to the invitational the same way others did, Flathau said. Messages were sent out to some photographers with the request that they send those to even more people. Flathau said there were about 40 total invites; he expects about eight to respond and be exhibited.
It was a method that relied upon a social network of photographers.
"Maybe we're at an age that it's not quite as tooth and nail as it was," Brayne said when asked if the pros are too caught up in territorial battles for business to hang out together. "For instance, we refer people now and say, 'Why don't you try so-and-so?' At least that way, you can keep it within your circle of friends or your network, rather than see everything go totally outside."
Most of the photographers involved, Brayne said, are from contacts formed when he and Flathau met around 1980 during a documentary shoot they and others worked on.
McGinnis, while sitting in a Battle Creek Starbucks far from his usual photo hunting grounds of Capitol Hill, likened the idea of photographers feeling kinship with any other job.
"I think in life, if you work in the post office, you're going to hang around postal workers," he said. "If you're a doctor, you're going to associate with doctors. Yes, there will be a fellowship."
In "DC to BC," McGinnis will show pictures of presidents and the powerful alongside local youth and local history. President Barack Obama or Congressman John Boehner, he said, are no different than the kids who were working the Starbucks counter five feet away; they're all people, and he needs them all to make his pictures work.
Of course, that larger network of photographers has touched McGinnis as well. When he met black civil rights photographer Ernest Withers at an event years ago, he didn't know who the man was or that he marched with Martin Luther King Jr., served as an FBI informant and took shots likely recognized all over the world.
"I was like, 'OK,'" McGinnis said, "'who is this old dude walking into the room?' He walks into the room with this camera around his neck. He takes the camera off from around his neck and he puts it around my neck."
McGinnis still carries in his camera bag a note of good luck Withers wrote for him, reminding him of that show of solidarity. A McGinnis shot of Withers will be featured at the Art Center.
That's not bad for someone who initially had no interest in the art.
McGinnis provided pictures for the Enquirer as a freelancer and has, over the years, had his work appear in papers such as the Washington Post. He got his start, though, developing film for a labor union publication. He couldn't say where his spark of interest in picking up a camera came from, but it did come, and now he'll show work from his two worlds at the Art Center.
For the exhibit, he spent time walking the streets of Battle Creek collecting moments like Bozell's.
"I just wanted to cover the features about Battle Creek," McGinnis said, "to get out of that comfort zone, to do feature stories like learning the history of the Sojourner Truth statue."
