There was a moment when ArtsWestchester Gallery Director Daryl Cooper found herself sitting on the floor, near tears and surrounded by a sea of photographs.
There was a point when exhibit curator Marc Weinstein knew it had come time to shift a stockpile of image files off of his computer and into a more usable format.
And, there was the stroke of luck when Ken Marsolais reached out to The Lasdon Foundation and secured a needed sponsorship for the show.
Taking a concept and translating it ”“ within months ”“ to reality, had the production team behind “Person to Person: An Exhibition of Portrait Photography” grasping at straws one minute and sighing with relief the next.
Marsolais, a theater producer and art collector, and Weinstein, an artist and president of Hawthorne-based Color Group Imaging Labs, drew upon their collective experiences to curate ArtsWestchester”™s latest exhibit, which runs through May 7 at the Arts Exchange in downtown White Plains.
“In today”™s economy, you”™re always trying to do things on a budget and always trying to spend as little money as possible, but still get the best outcome,” Cooper said. “Yes, we had to spend money, but luckily with this show, everything just kind of fell into place and we were able to do it on a very reasonable budget.”
“Everybody else did it from love,” Weinstein added. “It”™s what we do.”
An initial call for submissions in January resulted in more than 800 images.
By process of elimination, that number was narrowed and the work of some 108 artists was selected for the show that began April 1.
“At one point we had to be fairly critical and make subjective decisions,” Marsolais said.
About 95 percent of featured photographers hail from Westchester County.
There are varying photographic levels ranging from the work of a junior at John Jay High School to Herb Greene.
“What I wanted to get across was there had to be a connection between photographer and the subject,” Weinstein said of selected portrait works. “Sometimes the photographer controls the portrait and sometimes it”™s just a melding of vision between the two where they just come together.”
One vision the exhibit organizers shared was the desire to move beyond what Cooper called, the “mentality that photography is just point and click.”
“Photography is both an art, a science and a business,” said Janet Langsam, executive director of ArtsWestchester. “One thing that occurs to me is that photography is not dead. It is alive and well. Everything has gone so digital, but the purity and the essence of good photography and good printmaking is still there.”
Weinstein believes the photographic medium has actually been enhanced by digital printing, which his business centers on.
“The quality on its own level has gotten better and the certain ability to capture colors,” he said. “Now that we do inkjet printing, we have 12 or 8-color printers and some of these photos are actually half color, half black and white. So there”™s all kinds of new ways of looking and seeing.”
