Meet The Guild at LightBox 2023

Saturday, January 14, 4 – 7pm

LightBox Photographic
1045 Marine Drive
Astoria, OR 97103
503.468.0238
info@lightbox-photographic.com

We are happy and proud to announce the Guild at LightBox for 2023.
Rachel Wolf, Jody Miller, Julie Moore, Angel O’Biren, Jim Fitzgerald, Michael Puff, Loren Nelson, Sam Blair

The Guild at LIghtBox is a group of eight Photographic Artists that are embedded in the Upper Floor of LightBox. The Guild exhibits work, collaborates creatively, and supports the Mission of LightBox Photographic Gallery.

On Saturday, January 14th from 4 -7pm we invite you to Meet the Guild at LightBox.
We welcome them with new work on the walls and fresh ideas for a great year at LightBox Photographic Gallery. We wish to thank the Guild at LightBox for their endless creativity and helping make everything we do possible!

Jody Miller
I have been a photographer for most of my life. The daughter of two fine artists,  I grew up studying  painting and drawing. My first camera, a Box Brownie, was given  to me at age nine, and the love affair with photography has never ended. In 1982  my work began in earnest after attending Ansel Adams’ workshop in Carmel, California, studying with some of the great fine art photographers of our time.

For 45 years I worked in the television industry in Hollywood as a designer and animator, and my passion for photography melded beautifully with my profession. Now that I’m retired, I have the freedom to practice my art and travel, and am now able to live full time in my adopted home town of Astoria, Oregon.

I am primarily a landscape photographer; but any and all genres of fine art photography are represented in my work. I am eternally fascinated with the play of light against shadow no matter the subject matter. I especially love shooting at night, when shadows and color always delight and surprise me. I am now fortunate to be a member of a superb group of photographers, The Guild at LightBox Photographic Gallery, since 2021.

Jim Fitzgerald
My love affair with the trees and the natural world began at a young age. In my youth, family trips to Yosemite, Sequoia and the Oregon Coast helped set me on my artistic path which I follow today. I am a camera builder, educator, bookbinder and publisher and most importantly an environmentalist.

Being a west coast photographic artist, I specialize in intimate natural landscapes and the images I create are all produced with my hand built large and ultra large format cameras. Each fine art hand made print is a one-of-a-kind interpretation of the scene I have captured on my large sheet of film. I print my work exclusively in carbon transfer, a process perfected in 1864, allowing me to produce unique relief prints of exceptional depth, tone and archival permanence.

At present, my works are presented as framed prints and in 2018 I began creating and publishing my own fine press collector edition books and portfolios. These are printed entirely in carbon transfer with both images and text bound into the editions, a first of its kind in book presentation.

My prints are displayed without glass because I feel that my work is alive and needs to breathe. Furthermore, the archival qualities of my printing process means that nothing in the environment will affect the longevity of the print. Displaying the prints without glass allows the viewer to walk into my work and become one with the scene. Walk around these intimate scenes and see the subtle characteristics of a finely crafted carbon print.

Julie Moore
Julie Moore has been creating her evocative style of art for just shy of a decade. Though she has no formal training in photography, Julie has felt captivated by the visual arts throughout her life. She was first inspired to pick up a camera many years ago while visiting Ireland in the company of a shaman, and she has been photographing the beauty of her world ever since. Perhaps surprisingly, she creates her captivating art primarily with her iPhone, visualizing, creating and processing her images with the camera she carries in her pocket. She also creates some of her images with her Holga, a medium-format film camera. Julie makes many of her prints using the polymer-photogravure process. Drawn to this alternative method of printmaking, she also employs other complimentary techniques during the intaglio printing process, such as chine-collé and à la poupée. About her work, Julie has said: !My images share the way I see the world, its soft tenderness and extravagant beauty, its agonizing loss and exquisite aging.  I see the overlooked aspects of life and nature. There is small and precious beauty in the unseen, a part of everyday life that can go missing because it is not prominent, yet has much to teach us.” Julie’s work has been shown in a number of juried exhibitions in various galleries across the country.

Michael Puff
Michael Puff is a retired software architect at Stanford University and a former theater set designer. He now concentrates his energy on Fine Art Photography using 19th century printing processes.

Always involved in the visual arts, Michael began by studying painting. As a young adult, he worked as a scenic painter. During his university years, while pursuing a degree in Theater Arts and Egyptian Archaeology, he designed scenery winning several San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics awards.

His favorite subjects for photography encompass the natural world, the surreal and dancers. “I’m partial to images which are like theater, innovative, thought-provoking, and play with reality and illusion.” The captured movement created by performers forms a foundation for many of my images.

Michael has actively pursued photography as an art form since 2004. Beginning the spring of 2011, through workshops and private session, he has studied platinum/palladium printing with master printer Mark I. Nelson, creator of the Precision Digital Negatives system. Michael immediately fell in love with the hand made printing process. Additionally, he has attended workshops led by Greg Gorman, Elizabeth Opalenik, Diana Bloomfield, and Brian Taylor.

Puff’s work has been exhibited at the Ryan Gallery at Art Intersection, Gilbert,AZ; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; and LightBox Photographic Gallery, Astoria, OR. His work is included in the book Digital Negatives with QuadToneRIP published in 2021 by Focal Press. Puff counts Greg Gorman, Irving Penn, and Kenro Izu among his greatest artistic influences.

A current list of exhibits can be found at: http://mpuff.com/about.html

Angel O’Brien             
Angel O’Brien is a poet and an experimental alt-process photographic artist based in Portland, Oregon. Her inspiration comes from the palimpsest that is life and an important part of her creative practice is wandering the streets wherever she happens to be collecting images on film of the things that catch her eye. Angel’s studio is cluttered with boxes and bags of bits and baubles that she collects on these wanderings, everything from a bent nail or fallen shopping list to a rusted brake pad and a headless barbie doll.  She is constantly pulling into her work the fragments of place and time that simultaneously divulge and obscure. Her creative process is all about recognising how a time or a place intertwines with a person in a way that creates a moment, and then turning these into a visual memory.

Just after her 22nd birthday, Angel was in a terrible car accident that left her in a coma, and most of her twenties were spent recuperating. This experience of literally being broken and put back together again, of finding something worthy under the rubble can be seen as a theme in her life as an artist. Because of this, Angel has always seen potential in what others might discard. To this end, in 2007 she completed Metro’s Master Recycler program. In 2009, her now defunct restaurant, The Ladybug Organic Cafe, was chosen for the BEST Award by the City of Portland most notably for sending less garbage to the landfill in a year than the average family does in a month, despite serving 25,000 customers in that time.

Working with her hands has always come naturally to Angel, and she spent six years renovating old houses after attending architecture school at The Cooper Union in NYC. She has never stopped with house projects and is forever reusing, giving away and saving things that have more life left in them.

This passion for being creative with “waste” extends very much to her art practice. Everything from saving all the development process wastewater to be responsibly discarded by Metro to avoid its polluting our rivers to soaking paper in leftover gum emulsion to create a unique substrate upon which to make other prints. Using historical photographic processes, such as platinum-palladium, gum-bichromate and cyanotype printing methods, Angel creates the surrealist montages for which she is well known. Each of her one of a kind pieces is lovingly made by hand in her basement darkroom. Though she lives in Portland with her daughter, she has a lifelong case of wanderlust and is often found in other parts of the universe.

Rachel Wolf
Rachel Wolf is a professional photographer who specializes in camera-less photography, alternative/antique processes, and creates immersive environments through light-based installations. Growing up in Alaska, the presence and absence of light has been profound in Rachel’s life and work. The aurora borealis gave her a direct experience of light as both transcendent and embodied. Since then, light has been Rachel’s muse, and her work is devoted to exploring and expressing its multivalent qualities in the field of photography and beyond. Rachel loves to inspire others by sharing her passion for light and photography as a professor and speaker. She also believes in the power of art as a collaborative endeavour and its raising of community. She is a founding member of FO(u)RT Collective, a multi-disciplinary arts collective that creates/curates exhibitions and events. Rachel has exhibited both nationally and internationally including Germany, Hungary, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Seattle, and Portland. Her work is held in both public and private collections. Rachel earned her BA from Hampshire College and her MFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art, and can be found playing in her darkroom in Portland, OR.

“While my images are photographs, the principle method I use to create is without a camera. Camera-less photography consists of the family of grams: photograms, chemigrams, and luminograms. As my camera-less process blurs the distinctions between these grams I call my work liminography, which is an exploration of the essence of the photographic process that consists of standing at the threshold (a liminal space) and turning light into matter. By releasing our expectations of how a photograph is created and what emerges as the image, we are invited to consider what a photograph is, must or can be.”

Loren Nelson    
In 1972, Loren Nelson picked up a Deardorff 4X5 view camera and began to organize the world on a four-by-five-inch piece of frosted glass. Nelson photographed with film and used a traditional darkroom to produce silver gelatin prints for over 40 years. But recently, he has incorporated a digital workflow, using 35mm digital cameras and an iPhone to more spontaneously respond to his surroundings, and printing his images with archival pigment inks on fine-art papers. Portfolios include landscapes, seascapes, botanicals, driftwood details, and “Under Wraps”, a series of plastic-wrapped buildings.

Loren Nelson’s photographs are in numerous public and private collections, including the Portland Art Museum; the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem, OR; and the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, Tampa, FL. He is represented by the Portland Art Museum/Rental Sales Gallery in Portland, OR, and LightBox Photographic Gallery in Astoria, OR, and has been published in View Camera, LensWork, B&W, Analog Forever, and Shots Magazines.

“If you want to learn what someone fears losing, watch what they photograph.”    ~Anonymous

This quote resonates with my approach to photographing, especially in recent years, as threats to our environment are becoming more and more apparent. For many years I have been content to make carefully composed photographs that celebrate the beauty of our natural world. But lately, I feel an urgency to photograph elements of nature that are in observable danger of disappearing. Working with digital cameras has expanded my vision and inspired me to connect more intuitively to my environment. I am currently working with Willamette Partnership providing images for The Oak Accord, a voluntary conservation agreement with landowners in the Willamette Valley, and focusing on their commitment to preserving and restoring Oregon oak savannas. I am also contributing photographs for the Oregon Shores Conservation Coalition, for use in helping to protect and preserve our magnificent coastline for future generations.

Sam Blair

Sam Blair has a B.A. degree in English from the University of Denver, and a J.D. degree from Lewis and Clark College of Law. He was a civil litigator for 35 years, with offices in Oregon and Hawaii. When practicing, he was named one of “Americas Best Lawyers”. He also had a weekly column in Kauai’s newspaper, The Garden Isle. He has taught as an Adjunct Professor of Law at Willamette University College of Law in Salem, Or.

He is afflicted with wanderlust, and retired from practicing Law to pursue his passion of travel and fine art photography. As a self taught photographer, he has explored over 90 countries, and is the recipient of numerous photography awards. His images have been exhibited in galleries in both the U.S. and Canada. His mission is to capture “the essence of things” in other cultures, beaches, and the fascinating homo sapien.

He is also a haiku poet. His poems have been published in multiple literary anthologies and journals. He teaches haiku poetry on behalf of the Writer’s Guild of Astoria, in Astoria, Ore.

Sam is a longtime student of Zen Buddhism, and trained in the Japanese martial art of Aikido, where he earned a Black Belt. He lives in a Pine forest fronting Kyle Lake in Warrenton Or.