Here is the artist's talk I had prepared.
Opening Reception, January 26, 2009
acclaim him, all you peoples.
Strong is his love for us;
he is faithful forever.
(Psalm 117, Grail translation)
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For a start, perhaps I can see the raucous, cackling gulls for the marvelous creatures they are.
When Kathrine Page asked me for a title for my photography show, I told her "Psalm 117". Psalm 117 and its much longer neighbor, Psalm 119, have become two of my favorite psalms. Psalm 119 celebrates in many-faceted delight the wonders of the law of God. In the law, God has given us a love letter to be read and re-read and savored with all our heart. In its 22 stanzas and 176 verses, Psalm 119 does just that.
Psalm 117 takes a different approach; short and sweet, straight to the point, it proclaims the essence of our faith and hope. It takes the shema and sings it to creation. All nations and all peoples are to praise God precisely because of his love and faithfulness to Israel, to the church, if you will, that extends from the beginning of the world to its its end. Like our father Abraham we have been blessed to be a blessing. In God's love for and faithfulness to us his people, the whole world has reason to rejoice.
O praise the Lord, all you nations,
acclaim him, all you peoples.
Strong is his love for us;
he is faithful forever.
So what does all of this have to do with photography and, in particular, Steven Tryon's photography?
In the autobiographical blurb I post with my photos at shows I say,
Many have commented on the peace I capture in my images. To seek and see the beauty of all things and all people is not to deny the evil and ugliness in the world and people – including myself – but to see evil for what it is and combat it by seeing through it and beyond it.But is there any hope to be seen? Can there be any true beauty and wholeness? Or is it all an exercise in wishful thinking, wish projection doomed to vanish as surely as our bodies are doomed to return to the dust? Psalm 117 answers succinctly and emphatically: the hope we cling to and the beauty we see are anchored securely in the strong love and faithfulness of God.
There are others whose skill and task and art it is to open eyes to the ugliness and evil that exist. Such is a high art and a noble task, for not to see evil is to be defeated by it. Yet my skill and task and art is to open eyes to hope and the reality of the beauty and wholeness that can be.
My photography has gravitated toward two emphases. On the one hand is the celebration of the beauty and wholeness that flow from the love and faithfulness of God. When I am on the trail or on the water, it is not just any beauty that I try to capture with the camera, but the beauty of God and his creation. The peace I find in paddling the canoe is the peace of God. On the other hand is the celebration of the means by which we come to know the love and faithfulness of God. This is where you will see my more explicitly religiously-themed photography. My event shooting falls somewhere in the middle, or maybe even bridges the two.
I got started in photography a long time ago. Dad got me a little box camera. It was black, cubical, used 620 film and had no adjustments whatsoever. I couldn't tell you what the make was. It took reasonably good pictures if one took some thought about what he was doing. It did much better in black and white, as I remember, than in color. I know I took a lot of perfectly uninspiring photos along Hiram Road in Framingham, Massachusetts with it. I would have been in first or second grade at the time.
Somewhere along the line, Dad taught me to think about what I was doing when I looked through the viewfinder. Set the picture up, balance it, pay attention framing and composition. That's pretty much what I still try to do. There are a lot of technical considerations that go into taking a good photograph, but if I can help someone else see what I saw, then I have at least a reasonably successful shot.
I didn't do much photography in high school and college. It wasn't until I graduated and went on active duty in the Army and had a real income for the first time in my life that I started taking pictures again. We have boxes and boxes full of 110 slides waiting to be gone through and selectively scanned. I flew Army helicopters in Alaska, and we did a lot of cross-country driving back and forth in that orange and white VW Bus. Then number one son came along and he was even cuter than the cats. Lots of pictures.
Life got a lot more complicated in Nome, where I worked for the FAA, and I didn't take nearly as many photographs, which is a shame, because it really was beautiful. Then it was on to Calvin Seminary, where money went for books instead of film. When I graduated from Calvin in 1985 I did not get a call to serve a local congregation, so I went back to my "other first love"; I've made my living in information system for the last twenty some odd years. But I didn't do a lot of photography until about ten years ago when I started getting back outside more.
Then in 2001 I bought a canoe. That changed my life in a lot of ways. Paddling is another art form I learned early on, as a camper at Deerfoot Lodge, a Christian wilderness camp for boys, about six miles north of Speculator in the Adirondacks. They treated canoes with a love and respect that approached their reverence for the Bible. The first thing we youngsters had to learn was how to get the canoe from the rack and launch it with without having the hull touch anything but air and water. Forty years later, when I first took that Curtis Solo Tripper out on Irondequoit Creek I could tell I was back into somethings special. I told folks, "This is what the good Lord had in mind when he said, 'Let there be canoe.'"
Canoes and cameras are a marriage made in heaven. I love the artistry of the single paddle, and the opportunities for photography are endless. Paddling is also a marvelous opportunity for quiet and solitude. I highly recommend it to any of you who are in or headed for the pastorate. I had shortly before that gotten hooked up with the local chapter of the Adirondack Mountain Club, thinking I would do more hiking, and maybe even climb some mountains. Well, the canoe rather took care of that. I became an active member of the waterways group, and even chaired it for a couple years. I did a lot of paddling. I took over the web page for the group and started posting my and other's paddling photographs along with our trip reports.
About the same time I developed or renewed an interest in fantasy art. (You have to realize that I first read the Lord of the Rings while I was in high school; I have long since lost track of the number of times I have reread it.) I eventually ended up in 2005 getting an account on deviantArt, a huge, global artists' community, so I could some of the artists whose work I had come to enjoy. Just for the fun of it, I uploaded a few of my paddling photos, and found, to my great surprise, that I could hold my own as a photographer. Mind you, I was still shooting with single-use, disposable cameras at the time. But I was careful how I used them. I would get a photo-CD along with my prints, do some minimal editing and cleanup, and upload my photos. I have learned a lot since then, and gotten much better equipment, but my number one, most-faved photograph on deviantArt, by far and away, is a shot of the Veterans Bridge taken with a single-use camera from the deck of my kayak in the middle of the Genesee River. There is a lot to be said for good equipment, but the most important lens is still the one behind the camera.
When my job of twelve years vaporized a year ago last October, my good friend Kelly, who is also my financial advisor, no less, stood me up, looked me in the eye, and said, "Get the camera." She also told me, "Sure you know what you want to do when you grow up; you just don't know how to get there yet." Rather than take my life in my hands by trying to argue with Kelly, I went out and bought the Canon Rebel XTi that I used to take most of the photographs you see here. Also about that time I had a photograph accepted for a juried show, "Elsewhere", at the Image City Photography Gallery. I have exhibited there as a guest photographer three time since then. I just retrieved yesterday my "Genesee Bridges" photograph that hung in their just-concluded "Magic of Light" juried show. This show at Northeastern Seminary is my first solo show. A lot has happened this year.
A couple notes on the placement of photographs here at the seminary.
On the first floor is a collection of my color photography. My muse may dress in black and white, but I like my color, too. There is also a selection of what I call my "square deal" photographs. I do as little cropping as possible after the fact, so most of my shots are in the same 2:3 aspect ratio as came from the camera. Some shots, however, demand to be cropped square. Sometimes I know that when I take the photo, sometimes I figure it out when I am looking at the shot on-screen.
On the second floor I have black and white photographs. I like to play with lights and clouds. Sometimes I just like to play. "Three in the garage" and "Interpreter" are two of my favorite people shots, in the latter case because the person is invisible. I have often thought that sign interpreters and photographers share a common calling of becoming transparent. There is also a set of black and white "square deals".
On the third floor is more playing with light in black and white, with a couple color shots thrown in for good measure. If the "No paddling today" photo looks cold, I can assure you that it was.
On the fourth floor is sequence of black and white photographs of a somewhat more contemplative nature, on a worship and redemption theme. Across the hall from the prayer room seemed an appropriate place for a quieter collection.
Also on the fourth(?) floor are a pair of my photo boards, one from Flower City Work Camp last April, and one from last month at church. I am pretty much useless as a formal portrait photographer, but I do pretty well with event shoots and spontaneous portraits. I take it as high praise that some of the young folks at church use my photos for the Facebook IDs. And I must say that putting photo boards together is great fun.
Thank you all for coming.
Steve
