Steve O’Bryan presents “Contact With the Mythic” on Wednesday, September 19, 2018 at 7pm, Lone Tree Civic Center.
Arrive 15 minutes early for social time, to visit with your fellow club members and meet some new folks. The program is 7pm – 9pm.
Steve will discuss what to consider:
- What personally draws us to take the pictures we take?
- Between our “mind’s-eye” and the print, do other “meanings” of our images evolve and/or come to the surface? What contributes to these meanings?
- The concept of “contact” with the mythic, that is, those elements of the landscape that “hold the key to the secrets of the human heart: place, personal history, and metaphor… (Sally Mann)”
Photography as essentially self-portraiture. During this presentation we will consider what personally draws us in to take the pictures we take. Between the mind’s-eye to the print, do other “meanings” evolve and/or come to the surface?
In Colorado, we can get to places in which natural beauty is easy to find every day, every season, from every direction. For Steve, photography follows from the beauty of this 360-natural surround. He’s interested in blending nature with the human estimate of color and form. But photography is an expansive medium. He can also step into what the landscape painter, Kathryn Mapes Turner, calls the “metaphorical fog”, that is, create pictures that move beyond the literal to the mythic – that open emptiness that’s filled to the brim. The landscape can evoke all that we consider mythic – psychological potency, the thin places, the spirits, sparks of light, the unseen, the silent – those places where we are left on our own to “contact” a wildness beyond our control. To contact a wildness beyond our control. He is not saying that mountains, high deserts, canyons, waters, or the big sky speak to him, or that winds whisper ancient wisdom that no one else hears. No, but photography does skirt the edges of self-portraiture, often to the edge of the mythic. Our images come from somewhere inside – quite literally from the inside out; familiar images, perhaps, but ones that carry the recognition of personal meaning. The American photographer, Sally Mann, writes about this in Hold Still, her 2015 memoir with photos:
“Working in the inexhaustible natural pageant before me, I came to wonder if the artist who commands the landscape might in fact hold the key to the secrets of the human heart: place, personal history, and metaphor . . . it remain[s] for me to find those metaphors, encoded, half-forgotten clues within the . . . landscape (p. 210).”
As Mann suggests, the process of creating photographic art can break us open to this kind of awareness. So, what’s going on when we create our images?
The presentation will include a select number of images and ideas from the American photographers, Galen Rowell and Sally Mann, and from the American painter, Georgia O’Keeffe, along with a group of Steve’s recent photos that speak to these ideas.
Lastly, the next best thing to taking photographs is to talk about them. If possible, those who are willing will have an opportunity to project their images and say a few words about each. Our discussion and images should make for an interesting evening.
About Steve O’Bryan:
I grew up in Cincinnati, but after coming to the West I’ve never wanted to live anywhere else. I completed two degree programs at UCLA: an undergraduate degree in the History of Art and a graduate degree in Ancient History. I have spent almost twenty-five years teaching ancient Greek and Roman history at a university in Denver. From that perspective there’s not much that’s new under the sun. I’ve been becoming a serious photographer in the last five to seven years. My three essential/influential artists: American photographers, Galen Rowell and Sally Mann, and the American painter, Georgia O’Keeffe. Also influential is the American mythologist/writer, Joseph Campbell, and his ideas about myth/religion and their role in art and how we think about the human experience.
