'The Blink of Our Lifetimes—The Ecology of Dusk': An exhibition of moved-camera photographs by Pamela Petro opens July 26 at Beverley Street Studio School Gallery in Staunton.
STAUNTON – The photographs in Pamela Petro’s Dusk Series are often mistaken for pastel drawings. Or viewers assume that their mysterious, glowing, ghostly, colors and forms were manipulated in Photoshop or a similar computer program. Neither is true, said Beverley Street Studio School in a press release for an upcoming exhibition of Petro's work at the school's gallery in Staunton.
Instead, Petro makes her images by “painting” at dusk with the remains of day’s light — opening her digital camera’s shutter, focusing on a point or patch of light, and then moving the camera as if the light were pigment and her lens a brush, the release said.
The technique came about by accident. Petro writes, “I began the series in 2014 in a New Hampshire forest at day’s end. The light was too low to focus, and all my images blurred. I responded in a whim of anger: Oh yeah? You want to be out of focus? Well take that! I deliberately moved the camera while releasing the shutter. The results were astonishing! The images looked like haunting, abstract pastels.”
As Petro continued working with the technique, she contemplated the fleeting moments following sunset that we call “dusk” — the time the ancient Celts considered the beginning, rather than the end, of the day. (Actually, there are three stages of twilight: civil twilight, which begins at sunset; nautical twilight, when stars brighten; and astronomical twilight, just before darkness. The final moments of each are called dusk.)
“While nighttime obscures and daylight reveals,” Petro writes, “dusk — the transitory moment in between —suggests.” The low light and deepening shadows require that we both look harder and imagine harder to fill the gaps in our vision. Dusk demands nothing less than our fullest human engagement with place.
Petro’s dusk images offer glimpsed liaisons between day and night, observed and intuited, light and dark, seer and seen, the release said. After taking her first dusk photos, Petro writes, “I understood I hadn’t taken pictures of what I’d seen, so much as the rush of my imagination towards the forest. A moment of fusion rather than focus. A blur that resembled what the engaged gaze might see in the blink of our lifetimes, if we could experience geological time.”
The photographs in “The Blink of Our Lifetimes” represent ecologically critical locations in the Brazilian Amazon, Wales, and Oregon, as well as sites in Nova Scotia, New England, Quebec, Madeira, and, most recently, Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Different versions of this exhibition have been shown at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, and at A.P.E. Gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts.
The exhibition will run from July 26 to Sept. 15, with an opening reception featuring a short talk by the artist 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. on July 26 at Beverley Street Studio School Gallery on 22 W. Beverley St. in Staunton.
About the artist
Pamela Petro is an artist, writer and educator living in Northampton, Massachusetts. She’s the author of four books of literary nonfiction, an artist’s book, and a graphic script and has widely exhibited her photography. She teaches creative writing on Lesley University’s MFA Program and at Smith College, and directs the Dylan Thomas Summer School in Creative Writing at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, where she is also a Fellow.
Petro's book, "The Long Field — A Memoir, Wales, and the Presence of Absence," was published in the UK in 2021 and the US in 2023. It was a Travel Book of the Year for The Sunday Telegraph and The Financial Times and shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year. Learn more about Petro at www.pamelapetro.com
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