Photo by Emil Will” class=”uk-display-block uk-position-relative uk-visible-toggle”> click to enlarge

Photo by Emil Will

It’s an exciting time for Tampa Bay-area photographers. We’re in the middle of the inaugural St. Petersburg Month of Photography month, and the city’s about to crown its first photo laureate who will “create a document of Tampa Bay life, events, and its people for a year.”

Thirty-two local photographers threw their portfolios into the hat. From these, SPMOP organizers narrowed it down to five finalists—Selina Roman, Jaime Aelavanthara, Emily Will, Tristan Wheelock and Thomas Sayers-Ellis—whose work is currently on display at the Morean Arts Center at 719 Central Ave.

The photographer laureate award reception for St. Petersburg Month of Photography happens on Saturday, May 13 at Morean Arts Center in downtown St. Petersburg.

Some of them, like Roman and Aelavanthara, are already established as fine art photographers and photography professors in the Tampa Bay area. Others are students, journalists, musicians, and poets still making a name for themselves as photographers. All of them had interesting things to say when we asked them about inspiration, photography, and St. Pete.

Here are St. Pete’s photo laureate finalists in their own words.

What’s your biggest source(s) of inspiration?“The poetic reality of humanity—all of humanity—as I encounter it in its state of continuing creation. And the creative process. Simple acts, complex interactions and invisible actions. I like predicting, camera in hand, the wondrous exchanges.”—Thomas Sayers-Ellis

“As Chuck Close says, ‘Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.’ It may sound like hubris, but I truly believe this. I draw influence from various sources, but I don’t wait to be inspired. I just follow intuition.”—Tristan Wheelock

“My grandmother, Carol Upham, was my first inspiration. She introduced me to the world of photography and the art of storytelling. When I started to travel internationally, it then became my fuel of inspiration. Exploring new places and cultures while capturing the unique beauty and essence of each location is not only for me to revisit but also to share with others my perception of the world.”—Emily Will

“Florida is so mythic and mysterious—mermaids, mayhem and murder—to name a few. This state has always been my biggest source of inspiration at so many levels—the colors of its architecture, its history and its people, its mystery and myths. It continues to fascinate me, and I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else because my work is so rooted in the region.”—Selina Roman

“Outside of the visual arts, literature and the written word often inspire my image-making. I also find inspiration in my everyday surroundings, whether that’s a pocket of light, or a discovery made on a walk such as a bird’s nest, or an insect wing, or other found object that I can work into a photograph.”—Jaime Aelavanthara

  
Photo by Selina Roman” class=”uk-display-block uk-position-relative uk-visible-toggle”> click to enlarge

Photo by Selina Roman

What excites you about the prospect of photographing St. Pete for a year?

“I’m a boots-on-the-ground photographer. I walk. I talk. I meet. I learn. I befriend the shadows where both delight and despair can’t hide from exposure. Physical St. Pete and social St. Pete are uniquely layered in a great conversation about Florida, old world and new. I’m excited to be its visual listener.—Thomas Sayers-Ellis

“I have a long history with this community. I went to high school here. I left for years. I eventually returned and bought a house on a whim before prices skyrocketed. I’ve watched a great transformation begin, and I believe it will only continue. I love the idea of pointing a camera at that and creating a kind of historical record.”—Tristan Wheelock

“My family contributed to the early history of St. Petersburg. Photographing the city I was born and raised in would be an honor and a privilege. I would love to honor their vision and showcase the growth and diversity the city has to offer while also learning more about my own home.”—Emily Will

“What excites me about the prospect of photographing St Pete for a year is going beyond the obvious and discovering the hidden gems that the area has to offer—places and people that may have been overlooked but still add so much to the fabric of the city.”—Selina Roman

“St. Pete is a multi-faceted, vast place to explore, and that excites me! You can go from being in an urban setting, to white sand beaches, to a location that looks like it hasn’t changed since the Jurassic Period. Kayaking through the narrow mangrove tunnels at Weedon Island Preserve was an early immersion into Florida coastal wilderness and a place that kicked off the potentiality of the natural wonders that St. Pete has to offer.”—Jaime Aelavanthara

  
Photo by Tristan Wheelock” class=”uk-display-block uk-position-relative uk-visible-toggle”> click to enlarge

Photo by Tristan Wheelock

What do you hope to accomplish with your images of St. Pete?

“A new alphabet, a reservoir of images that any curious eye can feast on and wonder about the many here-wheres and elsewheres that make up St. Pete, the kind of testimony that suggests that both geography and biology need one another in tropical life, one grand environment!”—Thomas Sayers-Ellis

“I hope to show people all sides of this community. There’s, of course, the small geographical pocket the people want to occupy, but there’s also an entire world outside of that. There is a lot of underrepresentation in our community. As a photojournalist by trade, I feel equipped to document and share the stories of those who aren’t heard or seen. It’s valuable; it might even be a catalyst for positive change.”—Tristan Wheelock

  
Photo by Jaime Aelavanthara” class=”uk-display-block uk-position-relative uk-visible-toggle”> click to enlarge

Photo by Jaime Aelavanthara

“My main hope for photographing St. Pete is to showcase the beauty and individuality of the city, highlighting its distinctive features and landmarks, and capturing the essence of the local culture and lifestyle. I aim to create art that provokes thought, emotion, and a deeper understanding of the uniqueness of St. Pete.”—Emily Will

“My work is about finding the beauty in non-traditional places. I want viewers to be surprised and see the city in ways which may not be familiar to them.”—Selina Roman

“I hope to capture a sense of magic in our everyday surroundings. I constantly think about how we are all connected in this world and what unites us; to me, that is the shared human condition. I hope to continue examining our connection with the natural environment, each other, and with the places we inhabit to create a shared experience and sense of connection.”—Jaime Aelavanthara

  
Photo by Thomas Sayers-Ellis” class=”uk-display-block uk-position-relative uk-visible-toggle”> click to enlarge

Photo by Thomas Sayers-Ellis

In the era of digital photography, it can be easy to click away without a second thought, but what if every time you pressed the shutter, it cost you $5? That might sound like an insane proposition, but the beauty of large format photography is that you get images that are simply not possible with a full frame camera or even with the most expensive modern medium format camera. This neat video takes you behind the scenes to show you large format landscape photography’s process and some of the images you can create.

Coming to you from Ben Horne, this neat interesting video will show you the process of and images made during a large format landscape photography trip. Even the smallest large format size, 4×5, is behemoth compared to the sensor sizes we are more accustomed to, with a negative that is almost 15 times larger than a 35mm frame. This means that a large format image often comes with unimaginable levels of detail. Beyond that, large format cameras are often more versatile in certain ways, offering precise control of the image-making process that is not possible with smaller formats. Of course, the major downside is the cost, along with a relatively high barrier of entry when it comes to technique, but if you put in the time and effort, it can be tremendously rewarding and enjoyable. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Horne. 

The exhibition “Speaking with Light” is a provocative group show featuring landmark images captured by more than 30 contemporary Indigenous photographers. It’s an exhaustive and surprising collection of photos that documents important shifts in the art form over the past four decades.

But the show is also, and perhaps more interestingly, about the power of art-making itself — about the ability of artists to make objects that take command of the social narrative, that rewrite stories from their own perspective, and that offer up different endings.

The show aims “to shift power dynamics and bring attention to misrepresentations,” as the exhibition materials explain. These pictures of Indigenous people made by Indigenous people stand in opposition to centuries of imagery, created and distributed by outsiders, that confuse the truth about Native American history.

Organized by Will Wilson and John Rohrbach, the show acknowledges that the term “Indigenous” can be troublesome. Before the era of colonialism, native tribes were organized into scores of separate, sovereign entities with individual languages and cultural establishments. Grouping members of different tribes together in one show suggests every Native American shares the same perspective.

But the exhibition makes a solid argument for that economy of language by showing how mutual events — in particular, colonialism and its enduring impacts on humans, land and commerce — created a collective history among those tribes and contributed to common distortions and fabrications about their identities over time. Then it blows up those fictions with powerful imagery offering a different point of view.

Before it does all that, though, the show takes an important step back in time, opening with a series of formal, black-and-white portraits, taken in the mid-1800s, of tribal leaders on the occasion of their meetings with representatives of the U.S. government.

Such portraits were customary at the time and meant to document the negotiations between the tribes and the various entities that wanted their land and resources. The pictures are posed and peaceful and give no hints to what was really happening — that concessions of land by tribes were often forced and that agreements of protection were quickly broken by the government.

These relics make for an unusual opening for a show of contemporary art, but they lay important groundwork by establishing that these tribes were considered governments at the time. Native American officials stand shoulder-to-shoulder with federal representatives, equally. These tribes were actual nations, and that is a perspective held by many Native Americans — including the artists in this exhibition — today.

From there, “Speaking with Light” quickly moves onto the present, displaying work by Native American art photographers who challenge that sort of imagery and the decades of false narratives that followed. There are striking images in the mix.

Some of them are straightforward and speak for themselves, such as Zig Jackson’s 1999 diptych, “Beat Them Savages, San Francisco, California/Praise Them Savages, Salt Lake City, Utah.”

The piece pairs two photos of public sculptures of Native Americans — one that shows them submitting to white settlers, and a second that portrays them as heroic, noble savages. Set side-by-side, they show how representations of Indigenous people were arbitrary and reductive and used for whatever purpose was convenient at the time.

Another photo featured in the exhibition, Tom Jones’s 2006 “Chippewa” is simply a picture of a sign for a roadside motel, called The Chippewa, that features a male figure in full, feather headdress and promises guests an “indoor pool” and a “sun whirlpool.” The piece documents how Native American imagery was commodified — often, ridiculously — by non-natives for profit.

“Speaking with Light” also delves into fantasy with staged photos that make interesting observations about time and place. For his 2016 photo “Nothing Happened Here,” Jeremy Dennis concocted a photo of a contemporary Native American man sitting peacefully on a porch on New York’s Long Island with five arrows shot into his body. His stoic face shows no sign of pain or distress and the piece is meant to illustrate how the past sufferings of local Shinnecock nation go unrecognized by local authorities.

To set up her 2019 photo “Evolvers,” Cara Romero brought four Native American boys from a nearby reservation, dressed in traditional feathers and loin cloths, to a Southern California valley where their tribal nations originated and which is now home to a series of wind turbines. The piece has a science-fiction feel — the boys look to be running for their lives at the sight of the windmills — and is meant to evoke the enduring connection between people and their land.

Other photos get at different aspects of Native American identity. Some take on time, eschewing the sense that American history started when European settlers arrived. Some dive into current social issues that are the legacy of colonialism, such as violence and environmental damage.

But cumulatively, they aim for depth, adding layers of identity to a group of people who have too often been treated as singular objects. One of the best examples: the piece titled “Smiling Indians,” created by the performance artists known as The 1491s.

The piece is, simply, a digital slide show of contemporary Native Americans smiling, one after another. It is meant to contrast frequent representations of Indians as somber and humorless.

Some of the narratives in the show are extreme. Some pick and choose facts in service of the messages they want to convey. Some are unsettling and others are downright funny. Some feel journalistic while others are exaggerated.

What is important is that these pictures are owned by the people being pictured. They are created by insiders, not outsiders. They are, like all stories, both fact and fiction, but by claiming authorship, these artists are able to tell things their own way. That is the power of a photographer with skill and shrewdness, and that is the power of art.

IF YOU GO

“Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography” continues through May 22 at the Denver Art Museum. Info: 720-865-5000 or denverartmuseum.org.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, In The Know, to get entertainment news sent straight to your inbox.