ARTIST STATEMENT

Visual stager and heart speaker, I’m a story teller.

Photography is my favourite language, the strongest I think.

I want to express those emotions people generally try to hide and all those dreams they've given up and left on the side of the road.

My photographs show pieces of life, ordinary stories with another point of view, speechless faces, simple poetry, human being paradoxical beauties, loneliness acceptance, daily pains, love disenchantments, broken dreams and shiny souls…

Each picture of mine is a contemporary little tale.

All my work is about human being.

I visit our inner labyrinths and try to show what is inside our minds, to show some pieces of what is invisible to the eye.

I play with reality and surrealism. Imaginary deals with day-to-day.

I want to give to my pictures the faculty to speak.

Aestheticism should never be decorative.

Every picture should be meaningful, never vapid.

Art is subjective, that’s why it is so worthy.

An individual eye for universal feelings…

BIOGRAPHY

Dorothy-Shoes is a 28 years old, young French photographer.

She’s coming from theatre stages, because besides photography, she is also a drama actress. She is a self-taught photographer, she shoots with both her heart and her mind, and does not limit herself with technical guidelines. She started photography art in 2005 and got her first personal exhibition in Brussels / Belgium in 2006.

Since her first show, Dorothy-Shoes hasn’t looked back and she’s getting international renowned with her photography art. Her pictures have been published in magazines all over the world in France, Spain, United Emirate Estates, Indonesia, Greece, Germany. She also works as a graphic designer and photographer for many artists, bands, and theatre companies throughout France and the US. After several photography shows in France, Dorothy-Shoes exhibited her work in Cultural Centers in INDONESIA and in the collective exhibition of “ the 9^th Contemporary Art Festival ” in Hungary this past May.

 

Her work is also exhibited in Cultural Centers in UKRAINE and will be exhibited in New York in April 2009 for a collective exhibition of French artists in the Contemporary Art Network.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I do sometimes get asked why I bother to shoot pinhole. Why not shoot a "real" camera. Actually pinhole photography is one of the oldest form of photography in existence. Euclid described the principles of pinhole imagery as far back as 500 BC. There are even some scientists who believe that ancient cavemen used rudimentary pinholes to assist in their cave paintings. But honestly, the long history is not why I tote my pinhole around almost everywhere with me (I did a 16 minute exposure at the carousel the other night). I like it because it is simple. A wooden box. A piece of brass foil with a tiny hole. Another piece of wood in the form of a sliding slat to cover the pinhole and in effect act as the shutter. Done. No need to worry about meters, focus, shutter speeds, whether the image stabilization is on or not.

I once attended a lecture where the photographer encouraged the audience to shoot without a light meter. He explained that when one frees themselves of the need to worry about paying attention to the light meter, and instead just learns light and the exposure settings that go with it, they will be that much more free to concentrate on the other aspects of photography. It is sort of the same with pinhole; by making it simpler, and giving myself less to think about in terms of camera operation, it allows me to concentrate more on what I would like to take pictures of, as opposed to how I am going to take them.

I also shoot pinhole because I like the necessity of long exposure. The world looks different when shooting over a span of time as opposed to fractions of a second. We cannot see motion compressed into a single frame like cameras can. This fascinates me.

And finally I have to admit that sometimes I like things a bit soft, a bit impressionistic. Sometimes I do like them ultra sharp and crisp. To wring as much detail out of a scene as a lens and a piece of film are capable of. But sometimes I like the impression a place or time gives me. I will occasionally take my glasses off and look at the world. My vision is good enough that I can still see, but things definitely get softer. And at times this is appropriate. Sometimes the sense of a place is not conveyed through enormous amounts of detail, but through impressions of light, color or tone. Of shapes, patterns and relationships.

It is possible to do all of this with more traditional cameras, but at the same time pinhole does it all naturally. As with any camera, it is not perfect. Its characteristics are not for every scene. It is a tool, waiting for hands with an imagination behind them to unlock its capabilities.

BIOGRAPHY

Zeb Andrews has lived his entire life in the Pacific Northwest, it is therefore of little surprise that he became interested in photographing its many natural splendors. Bitten by the photography bug a little over six years ago while hiking in the Columbia River Gorge, he has combined his love for the outdoors with his passion for photography.

In the pursuit of his photography, Zeb is always mindful that even familiar locations can hold fascinatingly new perspectives. He often travels with a small assortment of cameras to help him photograph places in creative and new ways, be it with a plastic toy Holga, a wooden pinhole or his Pentax 6x7 loaded with Ortho or Infrared film. He enjoys the challenge of constantly shooting outside the box of what is expected of contemporary photography.

Zeb spends the majority of his week immersed in photography, working in a small camera store in Portland, Oregon. He has gained much of his inspiration from the photographers and photography he sees circulate through on a daily basis, and in turn enjoys passing as much of that along with his own photography as he can.