Art and Community

My parents recently moved to the outskirts of Philadelphia. With this, came a new city to explore when in town for family visits! Philadelphia's Magic Gardens are more than just a mosaic. It is the vision of Isaiah Zagar who purchased property on South Street and began the 14 year project of transforming a storefront and empty lot space next door to a whimsical playground. As I walked through this maze of color, texture and pattern, the true scale of a project like this was the most breathtaking. In the late 1960's, when Zagar and his wife moved to South Street, it was an area of brokenness and neglect, home to some of America's urban poor stuck in a cycle of poverty that doesn't leave much opportunity for escape. Seeing this, Zagar chose this particular location in order to draw public attention to the neighborhood and draw the community together. When walking through, down and around this fairyland, it is difficult to not feel a personal connection with the work. This garden as well as Zagar's many murals around the city stress the importance of the imagination. His view on art and emphasis on community building were pivital in transforming the community of South Philly.



------- mural reads: "Art is the center of the real world."--------



"Art should not be segregated in museums;
it needs to live free among us." -Isaiah Zagar

a return to the darkroom

It seems that the art of darkroom photography is quickly becoming something of the past. Many photographs that we see in advertisements, in magazines or on gallery walls, are digital alterations of the perceived world. Though technology has dramatically changed the world of Photography and graphic design, I find it refreshing to return to the darkroom. In a photography class I had in college, a local photographer came and spoke in class. He had started off in darkroom photography and later moved to digital. He explained that, although his recent pieces have been more abstract and all done on the computer, he believed that the darkroom allows the artist to manipulate the photo more than a computer program. The more I study photography, the more I see all the options available in the darkroom. In my photo's below, I barely scratched the surface of all the possibilities of the darkroom. I used contrast filters in nearly all the photo's and dodged or burned where needed. In the third photo, instead of dipping the exposed paper in a tray of developer, I wet my fingers and splattered the paper. This brought a bit more to an otherwise drab photo.

Welcome.

This blog is the beginning of a personal project made public in order to stimulate others to test out various creative endeavors and share ideas. This is to be a place of creative encouragement as well as a tool for others to get out of their own creative niche and try new things. Welcome and I look forward to sharing thoughts, methods and projects with you as you pass on those of your own.