| | | Mary Ruth Moore has been teaching beginning and advanced photography at
the University of Georgia for over 25 years.
Moore's art usually
involves a pinhole optic in color and black/white photography and is
inspired in rural south Oconee County, GA,
the Georgia islands,
Tuscany, Renaissance paintings, and passages from the Bible.
"Pinhole Photography is a way of life. The pinhole shows us what goes
on while no one is looking, a place of stillness and silence what we
cannot ordinarily experience. It is relatively slow, relatively soft,
with a depth of focus that is infinite. It is complex in its
simplicity, humorous in its irony, and shows drama in the mundane. One
must discover the pinhole's peculiarities and celebrate them. This
requires time, commitment and determination, a keen sense of light,
and an aptitude toward solving problems….
…My current obsession with photographing old bottles was inspired by
Giorgio Morandi, the 20th century master who painted bottles. He
said, "One can travel the world and see nothing. To achieve
understanding it is necessary not to see many things, but to look hard
at what you do see."
For this work I use an 8 x 10 inch studio camera, vintage 1900. My
negative is paper, a single-weight low contrast paper that Kodak no
longer makes. The exposures are quite long, from 10 minutes to
several hours, because the photographic paper responds to light very
slowly. I make all of these bottle photographs in my room with good light
and the 8 x 10 inch
negatives are contact printed. The old lens, paper
negative, and long exposure, contribute toward a distinct character in
the final print: a delicate grain and luminosity.”
| |