Dreams Exhibition

I was very honored to be asked by Hamidah Glasgow of The Center of Fine Art Photography to juror The Dreams Exhibition that opens this Friday in Colorado. It was a tough process, with over 3,000 images to select from....and the idea of narrowing down so much good work was painful. Over 60 images made it to the walls, but today I am featuring some of the images that made my top 100 and still need to see the light of day! I will be featuring the work of several award winners over the next few days.

Thank you to all who submitted and thank you for sharing your dreams, nightmares, and visions.

Emma Powell, Unmarried



Kevin Wilmes, Feed the Fish



Carrie Tomberlin, Inevitable



Rania Dutton O'Dell, The Clock Strikes Twelve



James Rohan, Toward Seaview



Bootsy Holler, Visiting Ruby



Deon Reynolds, Manhattan



Jen Williams, Untitled



Sean Stewart, Existential Anxiety



George E. Holroyd III, Lazy Sunday



Marilynn Waters, People at an Exhibition



Ellen Cantor, They told me I needed Screws from Unorthodox Anatomy, 2009



Melissa Hall, Sentinel



JuliAnne Kaplan, Fingers Dream



Martin Gremm, Business Casual



Marc Ullom, Transience 65



Ewa Zebrowski, Apparition



Anne Berry Captain



Caleb Dulock, Moving Day



Caleb Dulock, Resting Place



Jay Muhlin, Japan Dreams



Beatrix Jourdan, Point of View

Arthur Drooker

Photographer Arthur Drooker, spent several decades photographing the world in the present until he realized that his interest was exploring the past. His photographs of ruins, in the United States and in the Americas to the south, merged his passions for history and photography. He is drawn to these sites to "understand those who came before us, preserve what they left behind, and restore what they've built to our collective memory. In this act of creation, I confront my own mortality and become most alive."

While on location in 1995, as a writer-director for the A&E series, Civil War Journal, Arthur made his first photographs of ruins—the charred columns of Windsor, the famed antebellum mansion in Port Gibson, Mississippi. However, it wasn’t until a 2004 trip to the temples of Angkor in Cambodia that he began a photographic project around the subject. He identified twenty-five sites around the country and began his journey to create a unique photographic record of American ruins. His first book, American Ruins (Merrell, 2007), was an award-winning critical and commercial success that was featured on CBS Sunday Morning.

His new project and book, Lost Worlds: Ruins of the Americas (ACC, 2011) expand on Arthur's explorations, featuring elegant black and white photographs of significant ruins in Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America and South America. A traveling exhibition of prints from the book opens at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C. on December 5th, 2011.

I have three criteria for selecting these sites: They have to be preserved as historic ruins; they must make a distinctive architectural and geographic contribution to the series; and they should be suitable subjects for infrared photography, a medium that best evokes their inherent mystery.

Images from Lost Worlds: Ruins of the Americas
Machu Picchu, Urubamba, Peru



Infrared light is invisible to the human eye, but I use a specially adapted 35 mm digital camera to record it. Infrared's ethereal effect illuminates the otherworldly atmosphere that haunts ruins, allowing a photographer to transcend mere documentation and capture the elegiac beauty of crumbled walls, weathered facades and broken arches as no other format can.


Pyramid of Niches, El Tajin, Veracruz, Mexico



In making these images, I expand on a tradition established by pioneering photographers such as Timothy O’Sullivan, Claude Joseph Desire Charnay and William James Stillman, who first brought images of antiquities to the public. Now it’s my turn, using technology they never could have imagined, to respond to a question posed in 1855 by Abel Fletcher, a writer for the Photographic and Fine Art Journal. His query, a plea really, seems just as relevant now as it did then:

“Are not these monuments of former ages calling upon us, as artists, to come and secure their shadows by the pencil ray of Heaven, ere their crumbling forms shall pass away forever?”


Artillery Officers’ Quarters, Brimstone Hill Fortress, St. Kitts



Pyramid of Kukulkan, Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico



Stela F, Copan, Copan Ruinas, Honduras



San Nicolas de Bari, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic



Monasterio de San Francisco, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic



La Pagerie, Trois Illets, Martinique



Panama Viejo, Panama City, Panama



Ponce, Tiwanaku, Bolivia



San Ignacio Mini, Misiones, Argentina



Fort San Lorenzo, Colon, Panama




Sans Souci, Milot, Haiti



Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacan, Mexico



Pyramid of the Jaguar Priest, Tikal, El Peten, Guatemala

Corinne May Botz

I love ghost stories and anything that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up, so I was immediately drawn to the work of Corinne May Botz . The first image on her website gives you a clue into her work:

Parsonage Parlor (doll), from The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death


Corinne is "an artist who investigates the perception of space and our emotional connections to architecture and objects". She also is a story teller, exploring terrain that is uncomfortable and invisible. For her project, Haunted Houses, the use of suggestive imagery and digital recordings of shared ghost stories combine to stir our imaginations into other realms. Her work is currently on exhibition as part of the Crime Unseen show at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Illinois that will run through January 15, 2012. The exhibition also features the work of Richard Barnes, Christopher Dawson, Deborah Luster, Christian Patterson, Taryn Simon, Angela Strassheim and Krista Wortendyke. On December 1st, Corinne will lecture at The Glessner House Museum in Chicago.


Corinne received her BFA from the Maryland Institute, College of Art and her MFA from The Milton-Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. Her photographs have been internationally exhibited including shows at Wurttembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart, Germany; Bellwether Gallery in New York City; Hemphill Fine Arts in Washington D.C.; The Center for Contemporary Art, Torun, Poland and The Kennedy Museum in Athens, Ohio. She is the author of Haunted Houses (The Monacelli Press, 2010) and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (The Monacelli Press, 2004). Her work has been reviewed by publications including The New York Times, Village Voice, BookForum, and Modern Painters. She is the recipient of residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; Atlantic Center for the Arts; Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship in Stuttgart; Germany, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.


Haunted Houses is a long-term project in which I photographed and collected oral ghosts stories in over eighty haunted sites throughout the United States. The series was inspired by turn of the century spirit photographs and Victorian ghost stories written by women as a means of articulating domestic discontents. In being the medium through which the spirit of these houses was recorded, I continued the tradition of female sensitivity to the supernatural. When I photographed in haunted houses, I tried to open myself to the invisible nuances of a space. I photographed using a large format camera, with exposures often ranging from a few seconds to a few hours. Though the medium of the visible, photography makes the invisible apparent. By collecting extensive evidence of the surface, one becomes aware of what is missing, and a space is provided for the viewer to imagine the invisible.


Private Residence, Rhinebeck, New York



Haunted Houses provides a unique way of understanding our relationship to the spaces we inhabit, and reflects romantic and dystopian notions of the domestic realm. The notion of hauntedness activates and highlights the home, revealing the hidden narratives and possibilities of everyday life.


Apartment No.2, Brooklyn, New York



Haunted Houses includes an archive of first-hand ghost stories. The stories were collected on location and over the phone. They range in length from a few minutes to an hour. The voice is captured much like the space. Both image and text are haunted by absence, history, memory, and the possibility of never being seen or heard. Unlike the majority of horror films where the ghosts arrive as a result of an inopportune death, or to right a wrong, the inhabitants of these houses are often at a loss for why the ghosts are there, and in some cases the ghost is considered a source of comfort.


The Roehrs House, Franklin Lakes, New Jersey



La Posada Hotel,Winslow, Arizona



Private Residence, Hawthorne, New Jersey



Old Bermuda Inn, Staten Island, New York



El Rancho, Las Vegas, Nevada



Atlas Theatre, Cheyenne, Wyoming



Private Residence, Clinton, Maine



La Petite Theatre, New Orleans, Louisiana

Lenscratch Exhibition Opportunities

Lenscratch is creating exposure opportunities for photographers with group on-line exhibitions. Photographers will be allowed ONE entry per exhibition and ALL photographs will be published.

Submission Guidelines:
Image size: 72dpi at 1000px on the long side
Send name, title, location (where you captured the image), and link to your work (website or other)
In the subject of your e-mail, type the name of the exhibition (LOVE, etc) and e-mail to:
alinesmithson@gmail.com
If your images are sized incorrectly or the submission is incomplete, they will not be posted.

Submission Categories and Due Dates:

Due date: February 8th
LOVE Exhibition to run on February 14th

Raul Guerrero

Change happens slowly. If you desire to truly make a change you must start early -- Swahili Proverb



I first met Raul Guerrero when I was reviewing portfolios for senior photography students at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles last year. Shortly after Raul graduated he was offerered an opportunity to go to Tanzania, and while he was there he discovered the power of children and photography. He has started The Disposable Project and is raising funds through Kickstarter.

"From May 11th to July 20th, I was a volunteer at a preparatory school for kids called Born To Learn in the Newlands area of Moshi, Tanzania. This program was set up in order to give children in low income situations the opportunity to have a temporary general education, while they potentially get sponsored financially to attend an established school.

As people realize today, education is the main support for a nation. Through an effective education system, the people of an impoverished country can develop skills to break the cycle of destitution and ultimately improve the economy. The educational system in Tanzania is far from ideal. At the same time, having an empowered mentality is just as important as the education system itself. Photography can be just the tool needed to empower children at a young age.

Over the course of these 10 weeks, I provided 100 disposable cameras to 9 of the students in the Born To Learn program. I taught the kids some of the fundamentals of photography and later began giving them certain assignments in order to sharpen their photographic eye. Despite the language barrier, the kids responded well to the assignments and improvement began to show. At end of the project, the photographs were fascinating, resembling an incredible progression and understanding of basic photography concepts."




"We are planning to put a photography book together containing the strongest images from the project. With over 100 images in total, the layout of the book will consist of vignettes of every student with their photographs following a brief background on each kid. Your contributions will allow me to print the books and give each of the 9 kids the opportunity to tell their stories and show their work. The proceeds made from the books sold will go to sponsoring these children.

Along with the book, I will be printing, matting, and framing 12 20"x24" photographs. These images will be displayed in the near future at a show in Los Angeles, which is currently being planned. I'm also currently in the midst of confirming the work being showcased back in Tanzania.

When the project began, I set out on this project to also inspire the children and hopefully have them focus more on their academic lives, facilitated by the sponsorship funds made from the project. What better way to inspire them then to have 12 of their photographs framed and displayed for them to see in their home country?"

Images from The Disposable Project