Visual Art

Dusk Series, DublinLate, 2019

Dusk Series, Bordeaux Trees, 2019

Dusk Series, Toulouse, 2019

The Dusk Series

“The Dusk Series” deconstructs conventional photographic representations of landscapes. I began working on the series at the MacDowell Artists’ Colony in New Hampshire in Autumn, 2014. After a day of writing I’d go for a walk in the woods at dusk and try to take photographs, but they were always out of focus due to the low light. One day I finally decided to stop fighting the hour and the season. I extended the shutter speed and quickly moved the camera up and down as I shot. I looked like some kind of strange bird, pecking on the edge of the woods.

The results astonished me. I hadn’t taken photographs of what I’d seen, but of the moment the imagination moves, hoping to grasp something beyond itself, bigger than itself, which can’t quite be viewed or captured. The thing that Scottish poet Annie Boutelle says in her poem, “Liminal,” is “so imperceptible / one perceives.” These photos caught the blurred moments between day and night, seen and intuited, light and dark, and “focused” on moments of transition rather than stability. If humans could experience geological time, these images would be what we’d see in the blink of our lifetimes. They looked less like photos than abstract pastels, giving them a hand-made quality that deepened the bond between seer and seen.

Please note that they have not been altered in any way on the computer; they are exclusively created with movement and light. To date I have created images for the Dusk Series in Wales, New England, Nova Scotia, Oregon, and the Brazilian Amazon.

Pamela Petro is an author, artist and educator. Her fourth book, The Long Field – A Memoir, Wales, and the Presence of Absence, will be published in the UK in May, 2021 by Little Toller books. An upcoming exhibition of Dusk images – “The Blink of Our Lifetimes: The Ecology of Dusk” – will be held at A.P.E. Gallery in Northampton, MA in Spring, 2021. Pamela teaches creative nonfiction at Smith College, on Lesley University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program, and directs the Dylan Thomas Summer School in Creative Writing in Wales. For more “Dusk” images, please see www.pamelapetro.com. 

3 Generations of Haitian Batay Sugar Women

Bernadette Quirk, ME, PSA, lives in Lincoln, MA with her partner Mark on their small farm where they grow a variety of fruit trees and bushes, as well as home to three pet bunnies, three Dwarf Benton sheep, and one crazy pants dog from Georgia, USA. Bernadette, with one of her twenty-something children, is hoping to visit NPH – Dominican Republic in 2021.

Wise Old Goat

Gregory Antollino is a civil-rights lawyer in New York City. He studied art at Northwestern and at the Disquiet International Conference, where he took a class with photojournalist Deanne Fitzmaurice. Greg is assembling a portfolio of photos taken on six continents from 2005-2020. His work tends toward street photography (and portraiture), ephemera, doors and structures, animals – his is a bright photographic vision, owing perhaps to the darkness of the legal profession. Greg’s photography has been in several exhibitions, and in one of those he won first prize. Several literary journals have published his work, plus the New York Times. The Crow in this photo was patient enough to wait on a rock on the northern shore of Jersey, UK.

Country Pride

george l. stein is a photographer in the NY/NJ area focusing on capturing interesting juxtapositions and strong contrasts. He is on Instagram @steincapitalmgmt, @georgelstein, and @_dark__muse_.

Orpheus

Jodie Keenan (she/her) is a New England based digital illustrator, photographer, writer, and former roller derby skater who is obsessed with finding beauty in the macabre. She spent several years as a catalog photographer in the antiques industry and is currently working with an editor on her first novel, an American Gothic set in the American heartland. A partial portfolio of her work can be seen at artstation.com/jmk_wraith.