I went to the opening of the Luther Gerlach exhibit at Vita Art Center in Ventura last Friday night. It was one of the “First Fridays” art events that happen each month in Ventura. The work was breathtaking. You really have to see this work in person. If you aren’t able to make it to Ventura, he’ll be doing workshops at the Getty this summer and will be having an exhibit there as well. I hope to get him to be a guest speaker in Photo 140 in the fall. Here’s the description from Vita’s Website:
Luther Gerlach
Opening Friday, May 5, 2017 from 6:00 – 9:00 p.m.
exhibit dates: May 5 thru May 28, 2017
Gallery hours: M-F 10-4 pm Sat. & Sun. by appointment
Statement: “Quite often, I feel as if my soul is in the past and my mind is in the future. The vintage cameras and processes I use have a magical quality, which helps me to bring forth an indefinable depth of feeling and poetic structure in my photographs. My primary concern is that my art communicates both on a factual level, as well as on one of beauty and emotion.”
Inspiration: Luther Gerlach discovered his fascination for photography at an early age while traveling around the world with his anthropologist father. Over the last 30 years he has explored early photographic processes, concentrating on the processes used in the first fifty years of photography. Gerlach uses his extensive collection of antique cameras and lenses for his work, with a special focus on mammoth plate cameras. His passion for the last 15 years has been the wet plate collodion positive, ambrotypes and tintypes. Gerlach builds his own large format cameras, most recently The Griffiness 24″ by 26″, in 2013.
Feature: Gerlach’s work has been featured in numerous publications including View Camera, American Photographer, Shutterbug and Architectural Digest. His work is collected and shown internationally and included in numerous corporate and private museum collections including Michael Wilson Center of Photography, Denver Museum of Art , J. Paul Getty Museum, Prague National Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Minnesota Institute of Art Schacknow Museum of Fine Arts and LACMA. GerlachÕs work is currently hanging in the White House as part of President and Mrs. ObamaÕs art collection. He is chief consultant on a feature film depicting Eadweard MuybridgeÕs life and work, written and directed by Gary Oldman. Image shown: Aquatic #4