Sarah Groate with her two photos.
Sarah Groate’s photographs, Duke’s Arrival and Waiting at The Rainbow Bridge, married two of her great loves: photography and horses. Groate works at the CT Draft Horse Rescue, and she uses the horses there as both inspiration and the subjects of her art. “I just found that I loved photographing them,” she said. “They’re the true gentle giants.”
Groate’s pieces were two out of 88 photographs selected to appear in “IMAGES 2024,” an exhibition running now at Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave., through Aug. 25. The show is the oldest juried photography exhibition and competition in Connecticut, running since 1981. For this year’s show, the Shoreline Arts Alliance received over 600 submissions, which judges Morgan Post, Greg Canna, and Joseph Jerson narrowed down to the images in the Westville gallery’s walls.
This year marked Groate’s third consecutive year of being accepted into the exhibition. She described how her artistic process was closely connected to the horses she worked with. “I’d always wanted to meet Clydesdales,” she said, remembering visiting the horses at the CT Draft Horse Rescue. “They were asking if someone wanted to take photographs for training purposes.”
“My goal was always to use a photo to connect a horse with their forever person,” said Groate. “How I cherish them is by capturing their beauty and sharing their beauty.”
Bus Stop by Zane Hellmann.
Photography, perhaps more than any other art, represents the beauty that already exists in the world. Groate used her camera to capture the animal world, while other artists chose to focus on the plant or human world. Zane Hellmann’s Bus Stop depicts a group of people waiting for the bus, silhouetted against the pale angles of buildings and sky. The photograph is full of rectangles and light colors, so the brightly-dressed subjects, who refuse to conform to the geometric precision of their surroundings, draw the eye and appear especially alive. These people are boxed in — by their surroundings, by the schedule of the bus — but they reject it all to bring personality to the piece. Every face tells a story, every person is coming from somewhere and has somewhere to go.
Injustice by Sue Mullaney.
If Bus Stop tells a story of community, then Sue Mullaney’s Honorable Mention-winning Injustice tells one of isolation. The photograph shows a somewhat dilapidated, apparently abandoned house. The brilliance of the title is that one does not need to know what injustice has been committed; the sad look of the house, with its deep, empty eye-like windows, convinces the viewer that something has gone very wrong. The house takes up nearly the entire frame, which makes the photo appear very lonely. Part of the power of art is to anthropomorphize emotions onto lifeless subjects; the house in Injustice is just as alive as any human subject.
Fading Beauty by Scott Sewitch.
Scott Sewitch’s First Honors Winner Fading Beauty goes to the opposite end of the color spectrum, with vibrant, iridescent purples and pinks and oranges. The flower it depicts could almost be made of glass, with the way it shines and almost seems to move with the light. Although the photograph is entitled Fading Beauty, the beauty of the flower is preserved at its peak, perhaps a second before its petals drop. This is nature in its golden hour, and as Robert Frost reminds us, “nothing gold can stay.”
Lifeguards by John T. Deneka.
John T. Deneka’s Lifeguards tells an entire story by itself. The photo shows a bunch of young boys fooling around on a lifeguard’s chair, with two signs loudly proclaiming “Keep off!” Do they have permission to be there? Can that chair support all five of them? What are they thinking at that moment, watching their friend dangle off the edge? The photograph wisely does not answer these questions, but leaves it to the viewer to decode the scene. The glassy blue of the ocean behind them provides a visual counterpoint of calm to the action, which feels at once hectic and peaceful, in the way summer can only be when you are young.
The Girl Who Ran With Gazelles by Fruma Markowitz.
Some photos experiment with the medium of photography. Honorable Mention-winning The Girl Who Ran With Gazelles by Fruma Markowitz incorporates photographs taken from postcards shot by male photographers at a time when North Africa was colonized by Europeans. Markowitz recontextualizes these images and gives them a new life by pasting the figures into tapestry-like spreads.
“My imagination and a pair of scissors literally cut the portraits out of this posed, imposed reality, and offers them another world — a woman’s world — where my historical research coupled with their shared connective tissue can be realized within a new context, far away from the romanticized version of them as ‘other,’” explains Markowitz in a description of her work.
Markowitz’s photo, along with the work of the other photographers in the exhibit, prove that sometimes photography is all about finding something you love, and figuring out the best way to present it to the world so that they can learn to love it too. From Groate with her horses, to Deneka with his portraits of mundane moments in life, this exhibit takes something you might not usually see — or notice — and offers it up to you in a new light. Photography is about more than just pointing a camera and shooting. It’s about finding the art in the real world, and making the real world feel like art.
“Images 2024” runs at Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave., through Aug. 25. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.