When Andy Dufresne, acted by Tim Robbins, plays an angelically beautiful opera aria over the prison PA system in “The Shawshank Redemption,” the camera pans across hundreds of convicts in the prison yard standing enraptured by the music.
Photographer Mark James says that is what he wants to do with his photography.
“I want beauty to stop people,” James said. “Beauty has the power to arrest.”
Like James, the other three photographers exhibiting in Hillsdale’s current Visiting Artist Series, “Perspectives on Photography,” have unique visions for what they want to accomplish through their work. Though the dozens of photos in the gallery show differing styles and mediums, Casey Fatchett ‘97, Roxanne Fogel Kaufman, Lon Horwedel and James all attempt to capture something timeless in their work.
James is the only photographer in the show to shoot with pinhole cameras, creating large, monochromatic landscapes with dreamy light and ethereal softness.
“They’re very timeless and nostalgic,” he said.
To achieve this effect, James uses a lensless pinhole camera. Light from a scene passes through a small hole — f/256 for the photographically minded — on one side of the box and projects an inverted image onto the film on the other side. Though he currently uses wood cameras, his first camera was made out of a cardboard, envelope box.
“It’s weathered a few too many storms,” James said.
James uses film sensitive to the blue spectrum of light to achieve the antiquated tonality of his images.
“That’s the nature of the film itself,” Photographer and Lecturer of Art Doug Coon said.
Though a professional photographer for 40 years, James started using pinhole cameras 19 years ago after a friend gave him the cardboard box camera. Since then, he has made more than 500 pinhole images. .
“I let it sit for almost a year before putting film in it,” he said.” When I did, I knew I had finally found my expression for landscape.”
To James, modern photography has been overwhelmed by the post-modern instinct to shock. He does not oppose post-modernism entirely, but he believes it has desensitized viewers to both the beauty and the suffering in the world.
“If you shock people too much, they become indifferent,” he said.
Thus, James wants to slow down the way people look at photos and teach people “to see photography as a reverent and sacred act” instead of something merely to consume. He credits the Hudson River School, a 19th-Century American art movement, as the inspiration for his aesthetic vision.
“They saw nature in an ideal state,” James said during a presentation. “And I’m trying to capture a sense of timelessness so people will look deeper. What you photograph instantly starts to decay,” he continued, pointing to his work. “These scenes are gone. What remains is the photograph.”
Wedding photographer Fatchett said his work attempts to capture those brief, beautiful moments for married couples.
“It’s something that, in 20 years when they look back on it, will mean something more to them,” Fatchett said.
Photojournalist Lon Horwedel said that digital photography has dramatically changed the way photographers shoot and viewers consume media.
“It kills the moment. There isn’t as much visual impact as there used to be in the film days,” he said. “There’s nothing that happens in this world that isn’t documented. That’s the first time in the world this has ever happened.”
Horwedel started working as a photojournalist 29 years ago, before the invention of the digital camera “changed everything.”
“My mom was really into the art scene when I was a little kid,” Horwedel said. “Art was there even when I poo-pooed it. It was always an underlying current.”
By the time he graduated from high school, Horwedel realized he couldn’t become a professional golfer and turned much more seriously toward photography.
“Would I have done everything differently if I could have known it all was going to blow up? Probably not,” he said. “Photojournalism is pretty cool.”
Horwedel has photographed five living presidents, two Rose Bowls, two Orange Bowls, and the Alamo Bowl.
“If you had to pay to sit at the dugout at the Tigers game, it would cost a lot of money. I get paid to do it,” he said. “Going up in the Goodyear Blimp is one of the coolest things I’ve ever done.”
“Perspectives on Photography” runs through Feb. 14 in the Daughtrey Gallery in the Sage Center for the Arts. Roxanne Fogel Kaufman was unavailable for comment. See the next issue for more on Fatchett’s work as a professional wedding photographer in New York City.
snelson1@hillsdale.edu