Digi Snaps
John Vettese sees what develops
When Sarah Stolfa drew up a call for work to show at the opening of her new photography space, she included only one, very deliberate criterion: The artists had to be from Philadelphia.
The 21 photographers represented in the inaugural juried exhibition at Stolfa's Philadelphia Photo Arts Center are an otherwise eclectic bunch. The show includes color and black-and-white images, both digital and traditional silver; and imaginatively staged portraits, like Kyle Ferino's Death of a Salesman (pictured), sitting alongside haunting abstractions, such as D.M. Whitman's untitled image of a blurred, hazy nude floating facedown in a pool of water.
But all the work was done by emerging artists from the city, underscoring the importance of that first "P" in the center's acronym.
"I wanted to show that the PPAC is very dedicated to Philadelphia photographers," Stolfa says. The juror — Ariel Shanberg of the Center for Photography at Woodstock — was equally deliberate, Stolfa continues. "I also want to make Philadelphia part of the national and international dialogue about the medium."
With this mission of presenting local work while drawing the attention of outside eyes — resident artists, guest curators — Stolfa and the PPAC join a handful of like-minded photography nonprofits in Philadelphia. Some groups (such as Fishtown's Project Basho) are more active than others (like Center City's Yo Darkroom or Northern Liberties' Lightroom), but they all share a goal of building and nurturing the local photo community.
What makes the PPAC different is a focus exclusively on digital photography. The space, in the south end of the Crane Arts Building, includes not just a gallery, but a lab filled with Mac workstations, scanners and printers. Open to the public on a rental basis, it's a place for photographers to print their work digitally, whether they shoot on film and scan the negatives or shoot on D90 and pull the images off a memory card. These digital tools are the current standard of art school instruction, but are also extremely pricey to own personally.
"All photography students are taught on this gear, but then when we get out of school we don't have those same resources," says Stolfa, who completed her M.F.A. at Yale last year following a well-received showing of her series "The Regulars."
Pointing out an Aztek Premier drum scanner, she explains that it's an essential piece of equipment if a photographer wants to make a photographic print larger than 20 by 24 inches (which, in gallery terms, is a relatively modest size).
"That's a $16,000 scanner," Stolfa says. "I don't know any artist who can afford that kind of equipment."
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Stolfa is trying to keep pace with a rapidly changing medium, but also open up access to resources for working in that medium. In a way, the PPAC was born out of her own frustration with working as a photographer locally. Returning to the city after school, she found nowhere to work at the level she'd grown accustomed — making high-end scans, printing large-scale images.
"I'd have to either outsource it and pay more, or take the bus to New York, which was cheaper and let me do the work myself," Stolfa says. "But that takes a whole day to make scans. I'd have to leave the city. It changed the way I make work."
While providing Philadelphia with these work resources, Stolfa sees the PPAC fulfilling other needs, as well: There's education — the visiting artists program would include lectures and workshops for members and the public. And there's exposure — the PPAC gallery space is positioned brilliantly, directly alongside the lab. The two areas are distinctly separate, but integrated. With a minimum of dividing walls, the separation between people working, people exhibiting and people visiting is broken down.
Stolfa's ultimate goal is to create a dialogue among all those parties. The far end of the PPAC is used as a reading room of sorts, with a shelf of photography books and magazines gradually building up on a donation basis. She has plans to partner with art schools like Drexel and her fellow photo groups like Basho to create cross-programming.
"The great thing about grad school is having that community atmosphere," Stolfa says. "When you leave that environment, the community is gone."
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