Harrison Street Coffee Shop

"Best of 2008 Photo Show"
February 18. 2009

Amber, Morgan, and I made a visit to the Harrison Street Coffee Shop's Show today. It was nice to get out o the rainy, disgusting weather and look at a display of nothing but photography for once.

It was nice to see a show made of just photography, but the setup made it pretty difficult to take it in. I know it's in a cafe, but regardless, it's difficult to look in depth at the photos when people are sitting at the tables. I did really enjoy the writing under each photo though, I liked being provided with the websites of the artists and being able to see an example of lots of artist work in one place. I also liked reading their descriptions.

This was my favorite photo from the exhibit. It is called "Paper Boats" taken by Cameron Charles Lewis. The colors are fantastic; they're relatively similar, but stand out on their own really well. The description of this photo dealt with parting with your childhood. It's a very touching photo that I find very calming.

There were a couple of others in the show I really enjoyed, but the ones that stick out in my mind are the ones that bothered me. I don't want feel it's right to negatively critique the artists since I've only seen one piece of their work, so I won't mention their names, I'll only mention their pieces. I was really bothered by one called "Anon." It was a nice sized print and the concept about not knowing the figure's identity because his face wasn't shown was interesting to me, but I still didn't like the print. It was way too dark and there was no point of focus, and it just really got on my nerves. I was also bothered by "Death be a lady." It was a typical fashion shot with standard fashion lighting where the woman was holding a gun (but it was so dark it was hard to notice the gun.) When it originally ran as an ad for a makeup company the ad read something like "Call # for a good time and we'll shoot you." It was just corny and standard and irritated me. Overall, it was nice to see some good photos, but difficult to take in because of the setting.

The first two photos in this entry were taken by myself, but the third was taken from Lewis' website: http://flickr.com/photos/cameroncharles/