Showing: December 3rd-31st
Reception: Saturday December 10th, 5-7 pm
Participating Artists:
Maria Budner, Mary Elliott, Leonard Farwell, Steve Haimovitz, Becky Jaffe, Zohra Kalinkowitz, Deborah Lichtman, Ann Low, Don Melandry, Aphra Pia, Emmy Randol, John Rice, Diane Rice, Nancy Rubin, Cliff Saunders, Monika Schrag, Larry Statan, Carol Thomas, Theresa Thomas
Through her own photography, naturalist Becky Jaffe explores the innate sense of kinship she recognizes with other living beings. To further those explorations outside of her own work, Jaffe undertook curating an exhibition of her advanced photography students, each of them an artist in their own right. For the class, Jaffe wanted the artists to discover how the act of being behind the camera lens changes their viewpoint, physically, mentally and emotionally. In order to construct a common thread in each artist’s work, Jaffe posed this series of questions:
How does photography help you navigate your inquiry into your curiosities?
How does photography help connect you to what you love?
How does photography kindle your wonder?
What has photography revealed to you about the nature of ‘seeing’ itself?
How is photography teaching you to see with new eyes?
As each artist seeks to find and express these answers through the medium of photography, the viewers are also posed a challenge to ‘see’ through the eyes of each artist and experience how photography teaches them to view the world with ever-deeper vision.
Becky Jaffe Biography
Becky Jaffe Fine Art Photography explores the nature of Biophilia, the innate sense of kinship we recognize with other living beings. Featuring flora and fauna from national parks, wildlife refuges, and biological reserves in Africa, the United States, and Latin America, her photographs embody the philosophy stated by Yann Arthus Bertrand, “The Earth is Art, the photographer only a witness.”
A photographer, naturalist, and educator living in Oakland, California, Becky Jaffe teaches biology to Bay Area high school students and leads environmental science tours at the University of California’s Botanical Garden at Berkeley. Using in-camera techniques that stretch the photographic medium to create painterly effects, she fuses an artist’s sensibility with a biologist’s curiosity in order to communicate reverence for the natural world. She enjoys photographing birds and tropical insects in particular, and relishes those moments when the insects appear to be studying her.
Her photographs have been recognized by the California Academy of Sciences, the Center for Fine Art Photography, the Entomological Society of America, and have been published in The Buddhist Poetry Review, Bay Nature Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and National Geographic’s “Your Shot.”