Peter, fully dressed, looks down at a boy in white trunks swimming a length of the pool below. Turquoise hills stretch away into sunlight behind them. David Hockney’s stunning diagram of LA heat and cool blue water, frozen in stylised ripples, appears perfectly lucid in its equipoise of figure, hue and geometry, yet also tense and mysterious. What is the relationship between the two men: the swimmer submerged and unaware, the sentinel watching unseen from above?

Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) was painted in 1972. This monumental masterpiece has changed hands several times since, but never so conspicuously as in the winter of 2018, when it sold at Christie’s for $90m (£71m), breaking records for the most expensive work by a living artist.

The buyer was Pierre Chen, a Taiwanese multibillionaire in his late 60s, whose electronics company, Yageo, is a global leader in the passive components required for mobiles, laptops, desktops and cars. Chen founded the company in 1977, before he was even 21. In 1999 he also established the not-for-profit Yageo Foundation, which holds, or administers (or is it owns?), his massive art collection, a substantial tranche of which is now on display in Capturing the Moment at Tate Modern.

The first thing to say about this questionable enterprise is that Chen/Yageo owns some tremendous works of modern and contemporary art. He has the zeal and wealth of the titanic collector; and the advice, for more than 20 years, of a former Christie’s executive.

He owns an upside-down Georg Baselitz, several Picasso portraits and one of Francis Bacon’s screaming popes. He owns a quartet of Andy Warhol self-portraits in fading primary colours, and an eerie Warhol Double Marlon [Brando], silkscreened in sinister black on taupe.

He collects the enormous photographs of the German artist Thomas Struth: crowds overwhelmed by Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa in the Louvre, or simply flitting past like ephemeral ghosts before the deathless magnificence of Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin in Venice. These are all on show at Tate Modern, along with paintings by Gerhard Richter, Marlene Dumas, John Currin and Peter Doig.

The last, not incidentally, is one of Doig’s earliest and most valuable canoe paintings: in arsenical greens, the blond on board drifting an unsuspecting hand through ominous waters, based directly on a still from the horror film Friday the 13th.

So the promised connection between photography and painting is there in one fundamental sense. Namely that Chen buys both. It is also true that some of what he collects is painting based on photography (Warhol, Dumas, Doig), or photography that looks at painting (Struth, self-evidently). And in addition, he has some extraordinary works that unseat the imagery of both camera and brush by Richter.

Two landscapes by the German painter question the supposed truth of the original photographs to such an extent that one wonders whether these scenes – a Bavarian hillside, the motionless Venetian lagoon – contain hidden secrets. Richter’s transcriptions are neither sharp of focus nor rendering, his sporadic sfumato blurs implying that the world beyond the painted surface really is entirely lost to us.

A third painting shows the face of a long-dead woman: Richter’s Aunt Marianne, forever young and blond as she props baby Gerhard on a pillow in the 1930s. The silver-grey paint unites the two figures in hazy horizontal brushstrokes; something like distortion, or a memory one cannot bring into focus, or a presence that cannot be summoned from a photograph. Marianne was later sterilised and then murdered by the Nazis.

It is possible that visitors might make a connection back to another historic image four galleries earlier: Dorothea Lange’s immortal photograph of a destitute mother in a US pea-croppers’ camp in 1936, but I doubt it. This show is far too rambling and chaotic. To bolster Chen’s collection, Tate Modern includes ill-assorted works from its own, including strident new acquisitions by Christina Quarles and Laura Owens, and venerable portraits by Lucian Freud – including a deeply moving image of his mother painted by her deathbed – and Alice Neel, at least part of whose electrifying gifts as a painter come from living proximity to her New York subjects.

So the premise feels like nonsense. But worse still is the alignment of images. Did Lange take that heroic photograph – which resulted in emergency government aid – just to be hung in the same room as Bacon and Picasso as part of some vague talk about emotion and expression in 20th-century art? What has Neel got to do with Freud? Why are Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs of seas, touching on light, dark and the nature of infinity, related to abstract paintings?

The wall texts are almost comically simplistic. “While photographers grapple with the mechanics of the camera, painters work with the surface of the canvas and the texture of paint.” There is no thesis, no catalogue, no developed argument, barely a single striking idea on the subject of either painting or photography, let alone their relationship, even though this is art history 101.

It would have cost nothing to have shown the Hockney in a room of its own with the photos from which it derives (first serendipitously, and then by fascinating design) to open minds and eyes to the kind of visual knowledge the artist himself so much prizes. But all or any of this was too much trouble, unaccountably, for an exhibition running all the way through to the end of next January.

Why are the walls of one of our foremost public art museums being given to a private collector in this way? You may argue that this is a rare chance to see such great works here – though some are remarkably familiar from other loan shows – before they end up in someone else’s collection. For Pierre Chen follows the blue-chip market, after all.

Capturing the Moment is not a serious exhibition. To draw connections of any sort between the works feels ultimately specious. Some stuff we borrowed (I hope for free, given the burnishing effect of display in Tate Modern, though tickets are £20 a head) and some stuff we already owned. A more complacent exhibition cannot be imagined.

• Capturing the Moment: A Journey Through Painting and Photography is at Tate Modern, London, until 28 January 2024

PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) — Judith Joy Ross’ photography exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art will transport you to decades past.

Peter Barberie, Brodsky Curator of Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, says this body of Ross’ work “gives us a portrait of who we are in our time and place.”

Over 200 prints are on display; many of them made in Eastern Pennsylvania.

Joshua Chuang, Organizing Curator, says Ross first discovered photography at Moore College of Art.

“Straightforward photography captured my heart,” says photographer Ross.

Ross says she went out and photographed people and that when she took strangers’ photographs, she was intensely relating to them.

Ross works in series and the exhibition starts with Eurana Park, which Chuang says “is the park that she and her siblings went to when they were children.”

Ross calls the park kind of a Brigadoon.

Her portraits capture the human experience.

“We encounter all of these individuals who are just facing everyday life,” says Barberie. “Every photograph is a very brief exchange between two strangers who are sort of united by the big camera between them.”

Ross used an old-fashioned 8×10-inch view camera on a tripod to take photos.

Ross describes her photographs as “direct and honest and evocative.”

One of her longest running series is called Jobs. There are photographs of people at work in their uniforms, along with members of the military.

Chuang says Ross’ pictures have amazing emotional depth that match “the complexity of her subjects.”

Ross also photographed inside Hazleton public schools where she grew up.

“I wanted to help support people caring about children,” she says.

She’s also photographed visitors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in D.C. and members of Congress.

As you walk through the exhibition, you can see the progression of Ross’ work over the years.

“It’s quite epic in its arc, when you think about American history over the past 50 years,” Chuang says.

“I’m focused on looking until the world makes more sense and I see something,” says Ross. “When you get the frame right, you found meaning.”

“I hope people can connect with these people,” she says of her work.

Judith Joy Ross’ retrospective exhibition is on view through August 6.

Judith Joy Ross Photography exhibition/

Philadelphia Museum of Art

2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19130

A British photographer from Somerset, UK, who worked and lived in Ootacamund (now Udagamandalam; better known as Ooty) and Coonoor in British India, Albert Thomas Watson Penn operated largely outside of formal systems of photography such as societies and institutions, and its conventions and styles. He spent most of his life in the Nilgiris in southern India, where he worked as a commercial photographer, occasionally also contributing to ethnographic studies of the area.

Penn left his family home in Street, UK, shortly before turning twelve and, after a brief period in London, arrived in Madras (now Chennai) by 1864. He worked at the photography studio *Nicholas Brothers & Co., before moving to Ooty in 1865 to set up and operate a branch there. He married Elizabeth Eagan in 1870 and continued working there until he acquired the studio five years later, subsequently running it under his name. In 1877, a year after the onset of the Great Famine of South India, his business in Ooty slowed and he took his practice to Bangalore, where he photographed the cantonment and the relief work being carried out.

The following year, he travelled to the UK to learn more about photographic techniques and technology. When he returned the next year, he shut down the branch he had started in Bangalore in order to focus on his studio in Ooty, where business had again picked up, and which in 1880 he renamed as the Ootacamund Photo Establishment. In the decade that followed, he undertook two major photographic tours of South India. In 1902, Penn opened Reliance Auction and Commission Agency, through which he made regular sales for at least ten years after, while also running the Farrington Hotel for an indeterminate period. He left Ooty with his family in 1911 for Eversholt, England, but returned to India in 1922 to Coonoor, where he spent his last two years before succumbing to a stroke.

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Unlike many British photographers in India at the time, Penn did not affiliate himself with photographic societies or institutions such as the *Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). As a commercial photographer, his earnings came from portraits and group photographs of the British population in Ooty, Coonoor and other neighbouring hill stations. He took several of his photographs at social events such as dance balls, weddings and hunting trips and at recreational clubs where Penn was a member. He also produced landscape views of the hills around Ooty that were reminiscent in composition and style of European mountainscapes popular in Britain, in contrast to the architectural and topographic views typical of colonial photographers of the time. His panoramic photographs — which were made by joining multiple images — as well as the smaller pictures he made for printing on postcards enjoyed much popularity.

As a large proportion of the town’s population comprised visiting tourists and seasonal residents he had a constant clientele, enabling him to earn a steady annual income. His constant presence in British social circles and active participation in their recreational activities — such as hunts (he was an amateur rifle shot), athletic events, choral performances and concerts — contributed a great deal to the sustained patronage his studio received. His photographs of these events were often published in local or regional papers such as The South of India Observer or The Madras Mail.

Penn also accepted commissions for ethnographic studies of the native population of the region, which featured in such notable volumes as Ootacamund, a History (1908) by Frederick Price and Castes and Tribes of Southern India (1909) by Edgar Thurston. His images were notably different from others produced at the time: he photographed his subjects — mainly members of the indigenous Kurumba and Toda communities — as if in the course of their daily activities, such as farming, foraging, cattle-herding and even professional grooming, rather than in the static and heavily staged style that was the norm then. His photographs of Dancing Girls slumped from exhaustion or casual images of himself with his friends are just some examples of his commitment to journalistic documentation, which can be seen as early as 1876 in his work on the Great Famine of South India.

As he lived and worked far from the urban centres of colonial rule and rarely engaged with surveyors or institutions, Penn’s life has not come under much historical scrutiny. His biographical details in The Nicholas Brothers & A.T.W Penn: Photographers of South India 1855-1885, by his great-grandson Christopher Penn, were pieced together from press clippings, publications bearing his photographs and correspondences. Although Penn was a photographer of renown only in the local social and administrative circles, his photographs have since gained a wider audience. Now found in collections across Europe –– from Paris to Vienna and Berlin the largest number of his photographs are presently found in institutions in the UK, such as the *British Museum, the Royal Geographical Society and the National Army Museum.

This excerpt is taken from MAP Academy’s ‘Encyclopedia of Art’ with permission.

The MAP Academy is a non-profit, online platform — consisting of an Encyclopedia, Courses and a Blog — which encourages knowledge building and engagement with the visual arts of the region.

When Nicholas Blair first showed me his photographs for the book Castro to Christopher: Gay Streets of America 1979-1986, I had many thoughts. But, I admit, the one that pushed to the forefront right away was: “Why am I not in any of them?”

I was only half joking.

Back at that benighted time in LGBTQ+ history – way before anyone added the “T”, the “Q” or the “+” – the streets that Blair’s title refers to, San Francisco’s Castro District and New York’s Christopher Street, were occupied by what would now seem like a shockingly circumscribed group of people. On any given weekend on Christopher Street, Manhattan, where I could reliably be found, nearly every person you saw you either knew, recognised, or had already had sex with. While Gay Pride marches would bring tens of thousands of us to the streets every year, on all other days our footprint was relatively small, insular and every bit as site-specific as the title of Blair’s book suggests.

In the era of these photos, nearly everything that was commonly considered “gay” either happened on these streets or was connected to them. Buttressed by the bars, those streets were the only places where you could reliably meet significant numbers of people like you, announce yourself to them by your gaze and your gait, tease and befriend them, spawn a community with them and, naturally, meet them for sex. The more adventurous among us even had sex with them right then and there.

The result was that those streets of San Francisco and New York had a special frisson and freedom. They were as teeming with eros and interaction then as today they are isolating and alienating, thanks to our smartphone myopia. Luckily, that special world can be seen in all its heat, humour and intimacy in Blair’s photos. One image in his book has elements of all three: in the foreground two figures are kissing. Behind them stand three men, each looking in a different direction yet all driven by the same goal – to see and be seen. Each is presenting and searching, preening and praying. Their expressions may be soldier straight and hunter cold, but below lies fire.

The humour and edge of those streets is seen in high relief in an image of two leather daddies in full chaps drawing money from an ATM. It presents a perfect contrast between mundane and profane. And, make no mistake, a joyous embrace of the profane had a profound role in many of our lives in those years, way before such unimaginable things would occur as same-sex marriage, parenthood or even personhood. Back then, the gay world still had the thrill of outlaw culture, though, sadly, that came with the consequence of making us targets for everything from cruel taunts to life-threatening bashings. While Blair’s photos focus on celebrating the culture, anyone who was on the scene at the time could see beyond the frame, where danger always lay in wait. While it was common to hear the term “faggot” hurled in your direction back then, I never heard or read the term “homophobia”. There’s a simple reason for that. Most people back then didn’t think there was anything the least bit wrong in treating gay people with revulsion.

Despite that, those times brimmed with possibility and excitement. The era of these photos gains even more poignancy since it straddles the time just before Aids and the years when the disease threatened to wipe out gay people entirely. For that reason, and others, it’s impossible not to look at these photos without a profound sense of loss. But that’s hardly all I feel when I look at them. I also feel warmth and wit. I feel invention and defiance and, to quote Saint Donna (Summer), “I feel love”.

In the end, I do see myself in these photos, reflected in my connection to a sensibility and an experience that, however far removed from the current world, remains embedded in something eternal: history.

• Castro to Christopher: Gay Streets of America 1979-1986 by Nicholas Blair, with an introduction by veteran music critic Jim Farber, is published by powerHouse books

In 2021, Jonah Markowitz took an interest in the section of Kensington, Brooklyn, known as “Little Bangladesh.” He hasn’t stopped visiting.

Though he grew up just a few miles away, Jonah Markowitz, a photographer and documentarian based in Brooklyn, knew little about the neighborhood of Kensington before 2021. That’s when he noticed, in New York City data from the year before, that an outsize portion of applications for new business licenses came from the area that included Kensington.

So he began to check out the neighborhood, which had been a hub of Bangladeshi life in the city since the 1970s. Mr. Markowitz expected to start a project about economic trends in an immigrant community.

Instead, he spent almost two and a half years visiting the same corner in Kensington, working on a portrait of the quiet transformation of a New York City neighborhood.

Mr. Markowitz’s effort, which was published by the Metro desk this week, provided an intimate look at one of the city’s biggest Bangladeshi communities. With photographs, videos and text, Mr. Markowitz introduced readers to a street corner where newcomers seek work in construction and food delivery, and the Muslim faithful take up nearly an entire city block during Eid al-Fitr services.

“Sometimes we get numb to reorganizing of neighborhoods, of societies around us,” Mr. Markowitz said. “This project is in some way an antidote to that.”

After a few trips to Kensington, Mr. Markowitz pitched the idea to Jeffrey Furticella, a photo editor on the Metro desk. Mr. Furticella said he had a soft spot for stories about New York’s evolution.

“One of my main hopes that I discuss with photographers at the outset is to create a time capsule of a moment,” Mr. Furticella said. “New York is always changing, for better and for worse. Communities evolve, businesses come and go. Nothing lasts forever, and I think one of the great responsibilities of the Metro desk is to provide a historical record of a city that draws global curiosity.”

Mr. Markowitz said his reporting was slow going at first. He was stymied by language and cultural barriers.

“There’s a hesitancy to let outsiders in and, vice versa, there’s a hesitancy for outsiders to spend a lot of time there, frankly,” he said. “It took a fair amount of being present and showing up every day for them to trust that I was invested in the story.”

Mr. Markowitz visited Kensington about 75 times throughout the course of the project. He went to restaurants, private homes and local businesses. He tagged along on delivery rides, attended religious services and observed dance performances, all to glean more insight on the lives, values, worldviews and experiences of those who live in Kensington.

“By spending that amount of time, we were able to explore all these layers,” Mr. Furticella said, “these important themes of labor, the immigrant experience and political influence, of changing norms in a cultural environment where it’s heavily male-dominant, but women are increasingly creating space for themselves.”

Karen Zraick, a reporter on the Metro desk, and Samira Asma-Sadeque, a freelance writer based in New York, provided additional reporting from the neighborhood. Ms. Asma-Sadeque, who is Bangladeshi American, reveled in exploring the everyday routines of the area. “It’s just about a community existing, about daily, ordinary life,” she said. “That is the beauty of it for me.”

After several months of reporting, Mr. Markowitz and Mr. Furticella came up with a clear vision of how to render street scenes in a novel way. Mr. Markowitz used a Phantom high-speed camera, which can capture film at 1,000 frames per second. Just five seconds of footage taken by the Phantom, if slowed to 1,000 frames per second, results in a video that is almost four minutes long. It weighs more than 20 pounds and is typically used in highly controlled environments or in studio settings to record car-crash test footage.

“It’s one of these grail-level tools,” Mr. Furticella said. “It’s a highly unusual use of this camera, to use it in an editorial, storytelling capacity. And it was this fabulous experiment.”

Using the Phantom high-speed on city streets was a photojournalist’s dream, Mr. Markowitz said, because it allowed him to frame unguarded moments with depth and detail. In the digital presentation of the article, a man washing his face and a worshiper bowing in prayer are cinematic backdrops to text rolling down the screen.

Now that the project is complete, Mr. Markowitz plans to make regular visits to Kensington for the food — goat biryani and fuchka are “must have” dishes there, he said — and the friendships he has forged. Many of the families he got to know have even invited him to Bangladesh.

“I understand the smell of Istanbul,” the Turkish photographer Ara Güler used to say. And nowhere is the pungency of the city sharper than in his images of working boats on the Bosphorus. Having given up ambitions to be a film director, Güler devoted himself to making pictures in the 1950s as postwar democracy established greater press freedom. His first published story, on the city’s Armenian trawler boats, almost caused a riot at his newspaper office, when the fishermen turned up to protest about the fact that he had shown them swigging alcohol as they set out at dawn.

This picture was taken in the old caulking yards of Karaköy. The young man in the foreground invites you to imagine not only his life, but those of his colleagues beyond, at work or in conversation. “There is nothing without humans,” Güler said of his pictures. Though his image perfectly frames two distinct worlds, the skyline of mosques and minarets, and the waterside realities of shacks and barges and tyres, it is the people who count. “It was never about what venue I shot,” Güler said. “I shot pieces of life.”

Güler died in 2018, aged 90. This picture is included in an exhibition and retrospective book of 70 years of his work. He became, in the 1960s, the pre-eminent photojournalist in Turkey. He would carry with him four different Leica cameras on assignment, labelled for the different outlets for which he worked – Time magazine in the US, Stern in Germany, Paris Match in France and Hayat in Istanbul. The separation helped him think about what each audience might want, he said. It also gave a clue to his lifelong determination. He was never an artist, always a photojournalist: his aim, he suggested, was to be the honest “eye of Istanbul”.

Photography has long been celebrated as a medium that captures moments, freezes time, and conveys stories. It’s an art form that requires careful consideration, often a great deal of research, and – sometimes – months of planning. 

Canon recently launched a series called Beyond the Kitbag where Cecilie Harris, head of creative services at Canon EMEA spoke to 20 Canon ambassadors to find out how what motivates them to pick up their cameras and continue exploring their passion. 

Recent scientific studies emphasize the significance of storytelling and emotion in photography and how psychological events such as entering a “flow state” can be a contributing factor to a successful career. 

In this study, Cecilie Harris enlisted the help of Dr Richard Stephens, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Keele in the UK who analyzed 20 interviews in an attempt to work out if there is something that unifies freelance photographers. 

What Stephens calls a “flow state” comes from a recurring theme through his research interviews. Participants described feeling completely in the moment, as if on autopilot where creating felt calm and peaceful, and their mind was free of stress and anxiety. But that’s only a small factor in what keeps these professional photographers going. 

Stephens was able to break down the photographic process into four psychological states, all of which contribute to a feeling of satisfaction and complete immersion in the task. They are the flow state, creativity, the eureka moment, storytelling, and emotion. Although flow state might not be possible at all times, it’s this feeling that often drives photographers to create their best work. 

Flow state

If you’ve ever experienced a feeling of pure contentment in your photographic practice, you’ll know how rewarding it is. That feeling of pure bliss and unadulterated focus is what we all strive for; your mind doesn’t wander and you’re not left with any feelings of self-doubt. With imposter syndrome not knocking at the door, you tend to feel free of stress and anxiety i.e. you have entered a flow state. According to Dr Stephens, a flow state can be defined as an experience that is “intrinsically rewarding, leading to a great sense of achievement”. 

Several Canon Ambassadors mentioned times when they had experienced this without knowing what to call it. Lucia Griggi describes how she can “look the camera and nothing else matters,” Julie Pike explained how when she holds the camera, things happen automatically, while Emmanuel Oyeleke uses his camera as a tool to “overcome and mask my shyness.” He says it gives him a sense of boldness when it’s in his hand.

To be completely lost in the moment, unaware of your senses and surroundings, and not constricted by any doubts in your ability result in a dreamy, flow state that is the epitome of creative success. You’ll feel like time has been well spent and the positive effects will often carry into other parts of your day and life. 

The science of creativity

Photographers constantly strive for creativity, seeking to capture images that are authentic and engaging. The science of creativity defines it as the ability to generate ideas that are both novel and satisfying, but the pursuit of creativity can be challenging, especially when there are no clear goals at the beginning of a creative process.

Stephen Kotler, an American author, suggests science-based strategies to enhance creativity such as cultivating a good mood since it promotes a willingness to take risks and embrace unconventional ideas. 

There are several ways to coax creativity, you just have to find which suits you best. Canon ambassador Julie Pike tries to create a relaxing atmosphere on a shoot so, when she worked with the Norwegian singer Aurora and her sisters, she supplied Norwegian Bolle (sweet buns) and beer as a way of connecting with them and breaking the ice. 

You could also listen to your favorite music, set guidelines such as not shooting on sunny days, a tactic Martin Booth uses or even pass the creativity baton to your subject allowing them to be actively involved as Helen Bartlett does when shooting with children. By embracing these approaches, photographers can unlock their creative potential and continue to produce captivating work.

Eureka Moment

Eureka moments are sudden, euphoric breakthroughs that leave you and give you an instant, overwhelming feeling of victory. They often arise after a period of frustration or a creative block which is something most creatives will have to battle with at one point or another. 

For photographers, these moments are not uncommon, considering the inherent difficulty of the creative process which can lack a clear strategy from the start. These insightful breakthroughs where the solution finally emerges hold long-term motivational effects for photographers who can look back on these moments for reassurance. 

Several photographers shared their experiences of eureka moments during their creative processes. Helen Bartlett described it as a moment when you have a vision but it hasn’t materialized yet while Audun Rikardsen knows immediately when a personal image would have a lasting impact on him. Lucia Griggi, one of the few female surf photographers recalls a perfect wave breaking suddenly, leaving her in awe and Julie Pike recalled a moment when the perfect frame appeared before her eyes. These eureka moments serve as powerful reminders of the magic that happens when creativity aligns with intuition and inspiration.

Storytelling and Emotion

Narratives are essential for human cognition and communication, encompassing elements such as sequential plots, dramatic moments, archetypal characters, and moral lessons. Photographers adeptly capture the tension between exposition and impending action which evoke emotions and grabs the viewers’ attention. Emotional connections between photographers and subjects drive powerful images but purpose-driven storytelling required photographers to break boundaries, depict reality and often raise awareness around a topical or sensitive issue. 

Finbarr O’Reilly is a war photographer, but rather than capturing the cliché photos you often see of war, he tries to capture the people affected trying to maintain some normality in their everyday lives through his powerful image. Similarly, Wanda Martin strives to break down gender boundaries and depict the model’s personalities and the backstory of fashion through her editorial portraits. 

Photography is after all storytelling through images but more often than not it isn’t quite as simple as clicking the shutter and taking a nice photo. The most engaging of images that elicit emotion from the viewer requires careful planning, a lot of thought and a deep connection to the subject being photographed may that be a person, a landscape, or even a memory. By combining the four psychological states, photographers are able to push themselves further and delve deeper into the heart of who they are as creatives and what type of work they want to present. 

These are the best Canon cameras to suit beginners and professionals

Photos by Bloomsburg-based artist and railroad photographer Oren B. Helbok are part of “The Ties That Bind: Railroading in NEPA,” an exhibit that opens this week at Misericordia University’s Pauly Friedman Art Gallery.

We spoke with Helbok for a feature on the exhibit. This is an expanded version of the interview which appears in our main story. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: How did you come to be connected with this exhibit?

A: Erika Funke at WVIA deserves all of the credit for this. Erika did a Keystone Edition feature about train art and invited me to come onto the show.

Lainey Little (Ed: Pauley Friedman Art Gallery Director Lalaine Bangilan Little) was in the audience at WVIA. I handed her my card and I said keep in touch. A few months later that Lainey said, “I’m doing a show in the gallery with trains, and would you be interested in having some of your photographs displayed?” And I leapt at the chance.

Q: Tell me about your professional life, and your art, and how the two intersect.

A: I run The Exchange, which is a nonprofit arts organization down here in Bloomsburg. We take as our mission bringing the arts to all communities throughout our region.

It’s a deliberately vague mission, so we can do a whole bunch of different things. The heart of what we do is the gallery here on Main Street. We do nine shows a year, and most of them are open calls. We’ve done about 80 shows here since we moved into this space in 2014. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 people have shown work, and that’s everyone from university art professors to two-year-old children, and it all goes up together.

We also do other things. On the last Wednesday of every month we do live music. We call it the Listening Room. It’s not like going out to a bar where there are televisions and people talking. This is an intimate performance.

Q: How long have you been in Bloomsburg?

A: My wife (Sara Baker) and I moved to Pennsylvania in 1992, and we moved into Bloom in 2010.

Q: Tell me about your railfan photography. When did it start?

A: My father handed me a camera when I was six. That was in the spring of 1972. I had shown from the time I was teeny tiny an interest — I mean a passion for — trains.

I grew up in the Bronx. My parents would take me down to the Hudson River in our neighborhood to have picnic suppers. We’d sit on the platform of the train station at Riverdale, or we’d go out on the rocks on the river. But I was not watching the river. I was watching the trains.

Q: (Laughs) I know the feeling. I do! And your father was supportive?

A: My father had been into airplanes. He had gotten his private pilot’s license at age 18, but had never flown after that because he couldn’t afford it. He saw my passion for trains, and he just jumped in with both feet and became a hugely enthusiastic and knowledgeable railfan.

Q: I’m going to ask this question — and I’m not sure as a railfan if I could properly answer it myself — but what fascinates you about trains?

A: For some kids it’s planes. For some it’s cars. For me, it was trains.

When I was a kid, I think it was really the hardware. Trains are big and they move fast. And I think there is something fairly universal about the appeal of the railroad.

The epiphany I had about this was back in the fall of 2014. My daughter and I were on a college visit tour out in the Midwest. We were crossing Ohio. I like to avoid the interstates, so we’re taking the two-lane road. And every now and then up ahead, we’d see that little yellow sign for the railroad crossing. As we cross the track, I would look in both directions, you know, just to see if there’s anything there. I think that actually there’s something universal about that. When anyone — whether it’s a railfan or not — comes across a railroad track, it’s perpendicular to the way that they’re going. And it opens up the world in that perpendicular direction.

I think that was true for farm kids growing up in the Midwest 150 years ago, or someone up in the coal region. It was a way to get out and get somewhere else.

Q: You grew up in the Bronx, where of course there’s, there’s so much going on in terms of rail transportation, especially passenger service. Did that influence the way you looked at railroads?

A: Actually, even from the time I was a kid, I photographed minimally in the Bronx. I wish I had done more.

Q: Ah! Interesting. Where were you shooting then?

A: My father and I were traveling to go see steam trains.

Q: That seems to be your main focus, so I guess that hasn’t changed much over the years.

A: Right, though it’s not exclusive. What has changed, though, is that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized the appeal of the railroad and of railroading. It’s broader than what I had initially experienced.

To me, to photograph railroading and to photograph it comprehensively, there are three main themes: There is the hardware. There’s also the landscape and the way that the railroad interacts with its surroundings. That’s whether you’re in town or out in the countryside somewhere. And then there is the people. And the people have become much more central to my photography.

When I was a kid, every now and then I would photograph a human being working on a locomotive. Now that’s really most of what I do.

It’s partly to make up for all of those people who were so generous with my father and me, who gave us access to their railroads and taught us about what they were doing, whom I didn’t photograph. I regret that. And my way of paying them back is to do as much as I can of it now with the people who are here now, giving me access and showing me how the railroad works.

Q: You’re going to have a lot of folks who come to this exhibit who will be railfans, as we are, and who will appreciate the nuances that others may not see. But to those visitors who don’t necessarily have an interest in railroads, what do you hope they’ll take away from the exhibit?

A: I think that that railroading is a very broad subject. It’s not just the hardware, it’s the interaction of those trains with the environment. It’s the history. America was really built on the railroads.

And even in a place like Dallas, Pennsylvania, where the tracks have been gone for decades, part of the reason Dallas looks the way it does is because that track used to be there. There are still buildings left that were built there next to the tracks so that the railroad could provide freight service. The shape of those buildings, the shape of the landscape, was altered because of the way the trains came through.

I think it’s important for people to have that sense of how we got to where we are.

Q: Any other thoughts?

A: I would hope that some of them are also gonna be willing to call their legislators and say, “for crying out loud, can you just get a train running from Scranton to New Jersey!?”