For 18 years, Christopher Newport’s Art Department has held an annual photography exhibition. A month prior to the event, they release a call for artists to submit their work. Each and every artist submits a physical framed piece that cannot be heavily edited nor is formulated with the use of AI. Admission to see the beauty of the exhibition is completely void of cost. The exhibition that so many people have poured their hearts into was opened to the public on Nov. 2, 2024, and continues to remain open until Feb. 9, 2025.
This annual exhibition originated in 2007, when the arts interns observed that there were a lot of photographers across campus that didn’t have a place to put them. Those interns made sure the exhibition was open to more than just students, but faculty and people in the community as well.
Department Chair and Director of the Museum Studies program at Christopher Newport University, Dr. Michelle Ehardt, shined light on the most challenging part of leading this exhibition, making it coherent with all the different frames.
“It is always the hardest to lay out and design, because we never know what the art looks like until we drop it off. None of the frames match, none of the work looks alike [and] the themes are different..”
Dr. Ehardt and her team of interns did a fantastic job with the execution of the exhibition despite it being a small exhibit that is up for several weeks. The exhibition is stationed on the first and second floors
of the Mary M. Torggler Center of the Arts at Christopher Newport University. Dr. Edhart expressed, “We are very proud of the academic photography program. We have an outstanding photography program [and] many of our students go on to be professional photographers.”
This year’s Photography Exhibition will be judged by a 2023 CNU graduate alumni, Vance Solseth, who is returning to judge the submissions. While each judge has different specifications and criteria they judge based off of, it is important to all judges that the pieces hold meaning. Every piece of photography that is entered into the Photography Exhibition has a story to tell. Lina Recupero, a freshman with a serious interest in photography, expressed that her favorite thing about photography is, “Telling people’s stories in one single photo, because even if it doesn’t look like it tells a story, it does.”
Every photograph that paints the walls of this exhibition tells a story, whether that story be of light dancing across the camera lens, the beauty of nature from an angle most would never look twice at or a busy market bustling with people with their own stories and own motives.
The small yet impactful exhibit is organized by color, keeping the darker colors on the opening wall next to a very beautiful window that opens the exhibition. These artists submit photographs that capture moments that the average person would view as mundane and give the viewer a look into an entirely new world, from the bustling streets of New York to the soft beauty of nature from angles we’ve never seen before. Playing with light, angle and movement, these artists freeze a moment in time and share that with the viewer, showing them a bottled up second that never would have been if it weren’t for them. Each artist shows a glimmer of their humanity as they express themselves through a frozen second.
At the long wall that greets you as you enter the exhibition lies several photographs that utilize a technique known as painting with light across the frame.
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Christina Wark, a freshman majoring in photography, describes painting with light as “utilizing the bulb mode on a digital camera to capture the lines of light in the dark.”
When you walk through the exhibit, there are multiple different types of photos to see. One group involves seemingly mundane parts of nature that the photographer captured at wonderful angles and perspectives. Along one of the far walls, there are black and white photos of people that tell a vintage aesthetic story of their own, talking about their lives from within the black frame. Any human would normally not find beauty in the bones left on a train track, until the artist behind the photo entitled “Human Nature” captured its story and encapsulated it within the brown frame. Yet another artist captures the glowing light that creates a magical portal look that the Ferguson Center arches give, in what many CNU students view as the regular walkway they see every day.
The stillness and the beauty of a peaceful moment on the edge of a body of water is shared from within a crisp perfect second frozen within the frame. From branches discarded by rees that no longer needed them, captured and displayed for their beauty that would have otherwise been forgotten, to the busy farmers market where a man, with his own stories and own loves makes a sale, a moment that is often looked past, not the center of a piece of art that no one can turn away from. These perfect moments, these seconds in time that are often looked over in the haste to get to our destination, these artists capture these seemingly simple images and make them into beautiful artworks where people can stop and look.
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