GBHS photography students’ exhibition at The White Room
The Year 12 photography students whose exhibition will run at The White Room until 9 September. Photo: April Stevens.
Over the next fortnight, year 12 photography students from Golden Bay High School will present a small selection of their work in The White Room gallery in Takaka.
Nine of the 10 works are their first enlargements.
The school has only a small group of photography students at present. Photography teacher April Stevens said the photography course gave them an opportunity to learn a multitude of skills and to become aware of details, and was helping them to appreciate “art-making”, adding that photography was like “drawing with light”, and as such was a sensitising process.
During the course, the students are introduced to the creative processes involved in photography, such as composition and using a range of tone. They also learn to make the shift between snapshots and fine art, and are exposed to darkroom work.
“These are their first enlargements, and there has been a lot of learning to get to that point. In the last two months, the students have learned to control the process a lot more, using both established and digital practice. A lot of professional photographers are using both processes and even more ancient ones.”
For the enlargements, the students had to learn to shoot a film using a manual control on a SLR camera, load the film into tanks and use chemicals to develop the film in order to make the negatives.
Though they had to learn a complex process and create the images in a short timeframe, they have nevertheless produced some surprisingly subtle black-and-white works that invite the viewer to take a second look.
One student, who came in late into the course, has added a photogram to the exhibition. To make a photogram, a silhouette is created by laying objects directly on the surface of a photosensitive material such as photographic paper, which is then exposed to light. The resulting image varies in darkness dependent on the transparency of the objects used.
“I plan to show a few more of the students’ works at the [upcoming high school] Variety Concert. We will be hanging the work on 20 September in the hall for people to view.”
April said the students had come a long way even since preparing their White Room exhibition, which closes on 9 September. (Open Thursday, Friday and Saturday mornings.) Ina Holst
