Field Gallery Exhibition
“Being asked to photograph a master photographer is a bit intimidating, but that was my mandate when The Times asked me to go to the Field Gallery in Chilmark to shoot the 2021 Alison Shaw Advanced Mentorship Show, featuring the work of 10 outstanding photographers.
Co-owners Alison Shaw and Sue Dawson help their mentees discover their identities and strengths as photographers. It’s pretty intense in that it gets you to take a long, hard look at who you are, like psychotherapy with cameras (full disclosure: I took the mentorship program a couple of years ago).
Along the way, there is much valuable discussion about being an artist, displaying work, selling work, and how you can reach people with your photography. Part of the beauty of the class is that Alison and Sue start with respect for the work that each photographer brings. There is no sense of people being at different “levels” on some abstract scale; it’s about people developing their natural creative perspective. Or, as Sue put it, “It’s like I’m wearing a miner’s headlamp on my forehead. I’m standing behind each person we’re mentoring, shining my headlamp in front of them and illuminating their path. We’re not telling them what path to go down; we’re lighting their path and offering insight.”
Alison and Sue are highly productive teams, much like Bruce Springsteen and Jon Landau. Though Bruce is the organization's musical director, and Jon handles all the back-office stuff, they overlap extensively in terms of the creative direction of the enterprise. The same is true of Alison and Sue.
Alison can be intimidating, but not because she’s mean or aggressive (on the contrary, she’s extremely friendly). She’s intimidating because she has an incredibly discerning eye and doesn’t miss a thing. She’s intimidating because she will take every possible step and obsess over every detail to pursue absolute excellence. It shows in her work and the work that she and Sue help their mentees achieve. I still hear Alison’s voice in my head, and while I wish I could shut it off occasionally, she has continued pushing me to be a better photographer long after my mentorship program ended.
But back to the Field Gallery show. It covers various approaches, from sweeping scenic vistas to macro abstractions and plenty in between, beautifully displayed and thoughtfully arranged.
Some of the work is more in line with classic Martha’s Vineyard scenic photography, though with more ambitious aesthetic goals than a typical picture of, say, a sunrise. Much of the work is macro in perspective, coaxing art from details of what would otherwise be overlooked as commonplace, particularly in the work of Hillary Noyes-Keene. I could walk by the elements in her photos a hundred times and never think to photograph them, but she renders them beautifully.
The display of Patti Roberts’ imagery takes her provocative work to a higher level. Detailed images of tree branches were displayed alongside abstract images of underwater swimmers, with shapes and colors from the trees paying homage to the shapes and colors of the swimmers and giving the viewer an “aha!” moment (at least when this viewer’s wife pointed it out to him). Sarah Bowman’s wonderful abstract photos made for a fantastic aggregate display. In both cases, the individual images stood beautifully on their own, but the aggregate display added dimension to the portfolio.
It was nice to see some of my former mentee-mates. Dave Lear, a highly talented landscape photographer, has somehow managed to go even further on his path. Elizabeth Rylander has discovered a new and stronger voice in the two years since I’d seen her work (intriguingly, her demeanor struck me as somehow more confident, too).
On the other hand, Sarah Bowman was forced to shift gears completely. She was previously doing portraits of women in their homes, but due to COVID, “I couldn’t shoot people anymore. I was isolated.” She felt stuck and went to Sue for help. Sue asked her if there was a favorite photo she’d taken in the past two years, and Sarah showed her an abstract detail photo she’d taken on one of many long walks on the UCLA campus near her home. They both loved the photo, and Sue suggested it as a good direction, so Sarah kept taking long walks and shooting abstract iPhone photos, and with brilliant results, as you can see at the show (this supports Ansel Adams’s observation that “the single most important component of a camera is the 12 inches behind it”).
The show runs through May 27 at the Field Gallery in Chilmark.
