Left: “Anasazi Stairs,” by Tim Davis from Colorado Springs. Right: “Fiddler on the Roof,” by Barbara Rosner of Pagosa Springs. Two of the 30 images by 26 local photographers that will be on display at the Open Shutter Gallery
from Wednesday through April 11.
Art is meant to be seen. Even photography, a form that we are accustomed to seeing in publication, is best viewed in the original. Particularly when the images are in color and the magazine only publishes in black and white. It’s interesting to see the size of the work; images one expects to be large are actually small and vice versa.
Open Shutter Gallery is hosting “Published Works,” an exhibit of finalists from the Arts Perspective magazine photography contest.
The exhibit opens Wednesday with an opportunity to meet the photographers from 5 to 8 p.m.
Thirty images by 26 photographers from Colorado and Northwest New Mexico are featured in the exhibit. The submissions were by category: abstract, architectural/structure, alternative process/technique and portrait.
While most of the photographers are from Durango, Cortez, Pagosa Springs, Bayfield, Silverton, Hesperus and Mancos, one is from Aztec, N.M., another from Colorado Springs and a third from Alamosa.
One photographer, Leslie Raffelson is traveling from as far away as Peetz, a tiny Colorado town just south of the Nebraska border and north of Sterling. Raffelson submitted her image “Protection” in the portrait category. The image is of three horses huddled behind a bale of hay during a blinding winter blizzard.
According to Arts Perspective editor Sonja Horoshko, “Protection” is an image from a documentary series Raffelson did during the blizzard that buried the eastern plain in 15 feet of snow last December.
Former Telluride resident Liz Lance submitted her pictures from Portland, Maine, where she is studying. Lance is a finalist in the portrait category for “Washing Dishes in Langtang, Nepal,” an image of a boy squatting and scrubbing dishes.
The vivid color and size of Pagosa Springs’ photographer Barbara Rosner’s “Fiddler on the Roof,” surprised me. The image is 24 inches x 36 inches in a heavy black frame, the fiddler’s hair blowing in the wind, the rich terra cotta adobe highly contrasted against
a sapphire-blue sky.
In the landscape category, I was drawn to Durango photographer Claude Steeleman’s “Animas River Trail” in the magazine, but flipping through the as-not-yet-hung images at Open Shutter on Monday, the small “Storm’s Retreat,” by Mancos photographer Patricia Burk struck me for its elegant detail. The image would be more powerful as a larger print, but don’t overlook it for its size.
Arts Perspective would not tell the Herald how many submissions it received, but an additional 34 images are found in the pages of the magazine, including one image from each of the jurors.
Jurors were: Lou Swenson, fine-art photographer; Margy Dudley, owner of Open Shutter Gallery; Hal Gould, owner of Camera Obscura in Denver; and Loretta Young-Gautier, associate director of Camera Obscura Gallery and a fine-art photographer.
Awards will be given at the reception for prizewinners in each category. Perhaps they’ll also give an award to Raffelson for driving nine hours to be at this event.
artsjournalist@centurytel.net Leanne Goebel is a freelance writer specializing in the visual arts.
Contents copyright ©, the Durango Herald. All rights reservedCourtesy of Tim Davis
“Anasazi Stairs,” by Tim Davis from Colorado Springs,
is one of the 30 images by 26 local photographers
that will be on display at the Open Shutter Gallery
from Wednesday through April 11.
Leanne Goebel 
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