Michael Strain, Infrastructure

January 18 through February 28
The reception will be on Saturday, January 22 from 11-4 pm
Limited to 4 people at a time.  Masks Required.

The O’Brien Photo Gallery
2833 Willamette, Ste. B
Eugene, OR. 97405
(541) 729-3572
Open Monday – Friday from 1-5 pm
Call first to be sure we’re open
email:picmac1945@gmail.com
website: https://www.waltobrien.net/the-o-brien-photo-gallery

These images are abstracts from our built environment “infrastructure” featuring the likes of utility meters, parking stripes, manhole covers, and car bumpers in their utilitarian and/or incidental surroundings.

The viewer is invited to consider the objects in the photograph as compositional elements… rather than being the subject of the photograph per se. In my approach the intended subject is the composition itself, comprised of the geometrical, texture, color relationships, and cultural associations of the various objects. The photograph is an “abstract” or sample witnessed from a particular point of view.

These photographs were taken locally with an iPhone 6s in the Eugene Willamette Street Corridor and on trips to Montana, Guatemala, Oaxaca, Chiapas, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Growing up in Montana, I was first introduced to photography and darkroom work by my grandmother when I was about age eight. In college I managed the darkroom in my dorm while narrowly missing the popular photography courses taught at MIT by Minor White. In the mid-1970’s I began working with large format cameras and produced a series of one-of-a-kind 8×10 color Polaroid images taken with a home-built view camera. Having recently retired as an instrumentation scientist at the University of Oregon, I have renewed my photographic efforts, but now using an iPhone as my primary tool. The phone is kind of like a miniature view camera with a wide-angle lens. It is appealing because of its small, inconspicuous size making it perfect for international travel and spontaneity. Modern ink-jet printers capture the crisp, brilliant colors that drew me to the color Polaroid medium of days gone by.

https://www.photozonegallery.com/michael-strain