Convergence: The Art of Photography Reborn at Canessa Gallery

To expand and perfect their repertoire, musicians perform in public before live audiences. So, too, visual artists are obliged to show and tell if they’re to take their work to new heights. That much and more seems clear from “Convergence,” a new exhibit of images by students, both beginners and veterans, in the photography program at the College of San Mateo where old techniques and old technologies have been revived and recycled. Everything that rises must converge; so the show suggests.

Take the work, for example, of Jackie Wang, 28, who makes her home in Millbrae and who was hard hit not long ago in Paris, of all places, by the pandemic. COVID kept Wang in isolation for nine days and nine nights in a small room in an inexpensive hotel in the 11th arrondissement. “I decided to make the best of a bad situation,” Wang tells me.  The Convergence exhibit includes a dozen of her black-and-white photos, plus photos of 15 of her fellow students, including Alexander Aldana, Imogene Bump, Koa Cortina, Winnie Wang, Chandler Young and others enrolled at the College of San Mateo. If they’re part of a movement, it’s DYOT— do your own thing. If they have an aesthetic, it’s to recycle.

Wang explained that when she was “sad and lonely” and quarantined in Paris she used a Pentax SpotMatic, to photograph herself and the big bed in which she spent her time. Her photos are intentionally out of focus. Are they erotic? “The photos tease the viewer,” Wang told me. Indeed, they do.

Her classmate, Gabrielle de Saint Andrieu, 25, who lives in San Francisco, used her camera to photograph herself in a stained white dress, which she made to document what she calls her “first real heartbreak.” De Saint Andrieu aims for what might be called “retro,” though she prefers the words “antique” or “vintage.” She explains, “I want my photos to be timeless so the viewer doesn’t know when they were taken.” 

In addition to her self-portrait, the exhibit features a photo she took of the collapsed ruins of an old building, and another of a curious dog peeking out from behind the window of an old house. “I’m drawn to classic California photographers like Ansel Adams,” De Saint Andrieu says, “and to the California outdoors.” Like many of her classmates, she uses old techniques and technologies that despite the smartphone are making a serious comeback.

One student uses a camera from 1924 and a lens from 1908 long before she was born. Another, Shauna Mullins-Pellegrini, uses dry plate tintypes from about 1880, a process in which a photograph is shot and developed directly onto a metal plate coated with a chemical emulsion.

De Saint Andrieu favors the “platinum process” that was introduced and gained prominence at the end of the 19th century but was seldom utilized after WWII.” Now, all the rage from LA to San Francisco and beyond, it takes innovative photographers back to the future and locates them on the cutting edge of today. 

Patricia Leggett-Wantz salvages and recycles old slides she finds at SCRAP, which calls itself “a Creative Reuse Center and Arts Education nonprofit founded in 1976 in San Francisco.” One of her haunting photos, titled “Caged Bird” depicts a bird in a cage albeit in the background, while the foreground honors a woman, perhaps a nun, who wears a long black dress, her hair braided and her face a negative image. In another of Leggett-Wantz’s photos, titled “Obscured,” a gelatin silver print, a woman with a scarf wrapped around her head, holds a hand up in front of her face. She might be a refugee from a civil war or a bombed-out village.

Not all the images in the show at Canessa—which opened on Saturday February 11 and that culminates with a student presentation on Saturday February 25—emphasize the mysterious, the enigmatic and the obscure. Walter Benitez’s “Soldiers Laid to Rest” depicts a cemetery with perfectly lined tombstones and an imperfect yet beautiful tree that provides ample shade for the dead and buried. Another of his images depicts the lighthouse and the night sky at Pigeon Point near Pescadero.

All the students whose work is represented in Convergence are clearly talented. They’re becoming masters of old techniques and sophisticated darkroom technologies, and they’re keen observers of the world around them. “We’re often over-saturated with images and have to blot stuff out,” Leggett-Wantz told me. “But we also have to keep our eyes open and be receptive.” She adds, “I love walking and looking and photographing in the street.”

Leggett-Wantz, Walter Benitez, Gabrielle De Saint Andrieu and Daniel Escobar—who takes pictures of young people on bikes and with tattooes—benefit from one-on-one sessions with their teacher and fellow photographer, Richard Lohmann. “We’re learning from, and teaching one another, and also converging,” Lohmann says. “We’re making it new by reviving the old and we’re growing our talents by exhibiting for the viewing public.”

If You Go:

Convergence

Canessa Gallery, 708 Montgomery St. SF. 708zach@gmail.com

Student presentation, Free, Saturday, February 25, 4 pm to 7 pm.