Enchanted IMAGES
Event showcases fine art photography from New Mexico
To see Rozanne Hakala’s “Escalation” is to gaze into a gleaming metal tunnel with no end in sight.
It could be culled from a scifi or fantasy film or a thriller about being trapped in a claustrophobic nightmare.
It’s actually an escalator on Washington, D.C.’s Metro line captured by the Placitas photographer.
The print is one of more than 230 photographs to be displayed at the Annual New Mexico Photographic Art Show at EXPO New Mexico next weekend through April 23.
The annual event showcases fine art photography from New Mexico curated by four jurists and filed into seven categories, with awards presented in each division. Visitors can win a chance for a $100 Visa gift card by completing a People’s Choice Award ballot.
Corrales’ Sandy Corless grew up in Kansas and moved to New Mexico to earn a master’s degree in communications. That was about 40 years ago. She’s now an investment adviser, and her work in fine art photography has grown into a second career.
“I’m not one of those people cutting my teeth on a Brownie,” she said. “I didn’t do much photography until digital came out. I need instant gratification.
“I have photographed sandhill cranes for years. They’re probably my major subject.”
Largely self-taught, Corless picked up tips from both the Enchanted Lens Camera Club and the Festival of the Cranes, which draws professional photographers to the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. She edits her images, cutting out the chaos around her to create abstraction.
“I think so many of us in New Mexico are having a real love affair with these (birds),” she said. “We can celebrate their dancing, their flight and their migration. People say, ‘They’re in my yard; they come every year’.”
Albuquerque photographer
Amy Parish Jones picked up a camera when she decided to stay home to raise her three children. She shot wedding and family portraits until she dipped into fine art photography. “Hope Floats” represents her reaction to the 2016 presidential election.
“It’s a self-portrait,” she said. “It’s a composite. I had many feelings related to the election.
The image shows her wearing a vintage dress floating a balloon encased within a World War II gas mask.
“I bought it on eBay,” she said. “It’s from Russia or Lithuania.
“I think the mask is sort of protective; it’s shielding; it protects you from things you don’t want to see,” she said. “I want to hope the best for our country now. I’m keeping my awareness open.
“It’s a child-sized mask. You didn’t know when your city would be bombed.”
“Escalation’s” Hakala spent 30 years in Washington, D.C., working for a media production company before retiring here in 2013. She says she fell in love with the Southwest during a 2008 trip to the Grand Canyon. The irony that her chosen entry came from her East Coast roots isn’t lost on her.
“It’s something you don’t see in Albuquerque,” she said. “It was a winter day, and it was a very dead, lifeless sky, so I went underground.”
Although it seems like she stumbled upon an empty tunnel, in reality, the escalator was packed with subway passengers. She stood at its base with a tripod and used a long exposure to blur the bodies into obscurity.
Hakala is largely self-taught, other than a single college photography class. She bought a digital single-lens reflex camera in 2008. Photography gives her a freedom she couldn’t find elsewhere, she said.
It’s “being able to capture a moment in time and being able to inject my vision of what it could be.”