Roger Freeman’s surreal and ideal Cruise series and Colleen Mullin’s veristic Pictures of the Floating World portraits illustrate that photography presents more than straight “realistic” snapshots. Photographers frequently move beyond the camera’s ability for objective reproduction by imposing their imaginations, world-views and socio-psychological backgrounds into their images. It is as if Colleen and Roger fall (with cameras) into Alice’s “Wonderland”. Their photographs present personal dreamscapes created from the objective world. Remarkably, cameras can mechanically reproduce objective and subjective realities simultaneously. In the late afternoon and early evening hours (prior to, during and after formal dinner) Colleen Mullins searches for her “decisive” moments. She seeks unattractive truths, stages her subjects at their worst (frequently after “one” too many), and photographically amplifies their gestures. Mullins, like Leonardo da Vinci believed that true portraiture reveals all the psychic truths, not just the ideal and formally presented exteriors.
“While Colleen photographs the ‘dark-side’ below deck, I am on deck, in the light (at another location, place, and time), creating remarkably different impressions, “ Roger Freeman recently noted. Roger’s stark, beautiful and idealistic representations of architectural spaces and human forms provide a sharp contrast to Colleen’s garish gentrified vision. Conversely, Roger creates aesthetically beautiful and “modern formalist” photographs which present a pristine, yet equally surreal world. He adds infrared film to create luminous, ethereal light and selects the correct lens, angle, perspective and scale to articulate his vision. Freeman’s reality becomes a stunning minimalist design that accentuates the “chiaroscuro” effect – beautifully contrasting luminous light and dark values.
Roger Freeman received his MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago and is a professor and long standing administrator at Alfred University’s School of Art and Design in Alfred, New York. He served the photographic community for years as chair of the North East Region and on the National Board of Directors for the Society for Photographic Education. He currently teaches Alfred’s international studies program in Italy. Roger’s group and one-person exhibitions include: the Carpenter Center for the Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Workspace Gallery, University of Colorado, Boulder CO; Galerija Umetinnia, Narodnog Muzeja, Zader, Yugoslavia; Art Spaces, New York NY; E.J. Bellocq Gallery, Ruston, LA; the Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C.; and the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France; Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA; and Exchange National Bank, Chicago, Il; and the Weeks Gallery, Jamestown, NY.