| Images From Modulations of Light | |
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My interest in photography began in the mid-60s when, as an editor for the Sierra Club, I had the opportunity to explore its archival collection of prints by Ansel Adams, Cedric Wright, Philip Hyde, and others. It was enriched during the late 60s and early 70s, when I lived in Berkeley, through friendships with photographers at the Associated Student Union Studio at UC Berkeley, in particular, Dave Bohn, Roger Minick, and John Blaustein. |
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After several years in France, I
returned to the Bay Area and settled in San
Francisco. In the mid-80s I bought a
Nikon and from 1990 to 1994, worked on my first
serious project - photographing the
Montezuma Hills in the Sacramento Delta.
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I shoot film in both 35 mm and
medium format and in both black and white and
color, but I prefer color. I am especially drawn
to abstract patterns created by the interplay of
light, form, color, and space found in the
natural world. My most recent work has been with
patterns of water, sand and light on several
beaches at Pt. Reyes.
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Often I am startled to discover in the final
images the interrelated character of
natural forms – dying leaf and river canyon,
sand ripples and bird’s feathers. I hope
that these prints also reveal something else
less easy to describe, for whether walking the
Sacramento Delta’s rolling hills, or among the
gardens of
Strybing Arboretum, or on the beaches at Pt. Reyes, I am
always looking for that “something
else.” Influenced by the
work of Minor White,
Eliot Porter, and Ernst
Haas, among others, I try to capture not only
the textures and forms of a particular place at
a particular time, but also the feelings that go
beyond the concrete and particular to some other
more interior place. My work has been exhibited at the Benicia Public Library Art Gallery (2001), the Helen Crocker Russell Library of the Botanical Gardens at Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park (2002), and the Anja von Dittmarsch Gallery, San Francisco (2003). I was invited to exhibit my Montezuma Hills series at the Benicia Library a second time in May, 2004, as part of the traveling Smithsonian Exhibit, “Listening to the Prairie: Farming in Nature’s Image.” |
Sidney Hollister
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Modulations of Light
March 25 to May 6,
2006
28 color photographs
Reception for the
Artist
April 1, 2006
6pm to 8pm
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"Photography,
like all the arts, opens a door on the exterior physical world and on the interior world of the artist, in this case, the photographer. "In looking intensely at life, which the camera invites you to do, and trying to find compositional ways of organizing what you see, you search at the same time for meaning. "And even when you see the print that's the outcome of your search, you're often not sure what that meaning is, just as poets don't know the full meaning of the poems they write. "The process, start to finish, is one of risk, discovery - and luck!" |