Off the Page
August 2014
The idea for this project came from Salon member Jerry Atnip, who teaches a Fine Art Photography class at a local art school. In an effort to stimulate his students, he photocopied pages from a novel and gave each student one page. Their assignment: create an image based on or inspired by a sentence, phrase or word on their page. The resulting work, which Jerry shared with the Salon, was wonderful and showed the students' creativity, originality and fearlessness.
Upon seeing these images, the Salon decided to make this one of their monthly assignments to see if they could create work with the same freshness as Jerry's students. A book was chosen, William Gay's distinctly Southern, Provinces of Night, and seven pages were distributed, one to each member. The resulting work was something of a mixed bag, with some members electing to re-shoot their images and others quite happy with what they shot. The one thing that everyone agreed on, however, was how much fun the assignment had been.
With that, it was unanimously decided to make this a long-term project, with each member getting a total of six different pages. The project stretched to over a year as members struggled with how to interpret their pages, some of which seemed to provide little or no inspiration.
Below are the results of this project. In each member's gallery are the six photos they produced, along with the words that inspired the images.
The Off The Page exhibit debuted on September 19, 2014 in conjunction with the juried show Slow Exposures. Follow this link for more information.
Robert McCurley
Rick Smith
