by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
UNM photography students are taking their work out of the classroom and into the gallery.
Jim Stone's digital photography class organized a show called "Work Flow" at the Petting Zoo at 1407 Fourth St. S.W. It opened Friday, and its last day is today.
"I didn't have the show - the students did," Stone said. "It was their idea. They organized it - they did the work. This is why we have a great photo area, because the students are so good."
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Student Larissa Kramer has two pieces in the show.
They were shot in Italy and manipulated at UNM.
The first is called "Father Earth."
"The picture of the guy, I took in Italy, and he was holding a ball," Kramer said. "So, I layered the world to where he was holding the actual ball. The world and the background, I took those from the Internet. But the man I did take. In Italy, they have these people who dress up and stand around with a little basket at their feet. They're doing it for money."
Stone said students have a lot of freedom in the class.
"We treat the students as artists and encourage them to cross the lines into another medium when it helps them to follow their ideas," Stone said.
Student Matt Campbell got help from a painter in making his photograph "Paint Flame."
"Since I can't paint, I paint with my camera," Campbell said. "I decided to collaborate with one of the UNM painters who's a printmaker. He painted on a female breast and painted on a background. I took the picture that way."
With the subject set up against the background, he ignited the discharge from a spray paint can and shot the photo.
"The flame looks digitally added, but it's not," he said.
Student Robert Rainey turned two paintings from the old masters into photographs.
Using men in business suits, and the desert as a backdrop, he recreated a scene from Michelangelo's mural in the Sistine Chapel. He also recreated Caravaggio's "The Ecstasy of Saint Francis."
"I'm questioning where modernity begins and where antiquity ends," Rainey said. "They're markers in time, and I'm recreating them so you question time."
The next show, called "The Eye of the Alchemist," opens Friday at 6 p.m.
Using the same idea as "Work Flow," the show will feature work from Joseph Mougel's class, which teaches uncommon ways to develop photos.
"This is an exploration of alternative processes," said Campbell, who is in Mougel's class, as well. "These are old, 18th-century methods that were created by chemists, not photographers."
Campbell said UNM has talked about closing the class because it's chemically hazardous.
He said that would be
unnecessary.
"After working there for 20 years, I could see something cancerous, but not after a semester or a year," he said.
