PHOTO COURTESY GEORGE EASTMAN MUSEUM For much of his career, photographer Carl Chiarenza made collages from ripped paper and other bits of detritus and photographed them, resulting in quietly powerful abstract images such as the 1990 gelatin silver print, Untitled 280, seen here.
A lot has changed for photographer Carl Chiarenza since the 1950s, when as a teenager he was a valet parker at a new museum then called the George Eastman House. In those days, he spent time photographing places in and around Rochester, honing his talent and sharpening his eye for things that most people miss. All these years later, his life’s work in pictures is on display at the same institution where he once parked cars.
Many a cannabis consumer has an intimate relationship with his bud. But few have gotten as up close and personal with pot as Ted Kinsman, a scientific photographer at Rochester Institute of Technology who does not indulge in the jolly green grass. When Kinsman’s otherworldly images of microscopic parts of the cannabis plant started circulating on the internet in 2018, not everyone believed what they were seeing. Some took to Snopes.com to verify that the suspiciously psychedelically-hued images were true representations of pot. The sleuthing site confirmed that they were genuine images of cannabis, but clarified that Kinsman had digitally colorized them to make parts of the plant pop specifically the parts that get you high.
PHOTO PROVIDED I Listen to the Sky by Andrea Durfee. While taking in one of Andrea Durfee’s vibrant watercolor or acrylic paintings that seamlessly, almost imperceptibly, blend human forms with landscapes, it’s hard to believe she just wings it. No preliminary sketches. No color studies. “If I have the impulse, then I ll sit down and just sketch on the actual canvas or the paper and go from there,” Durfee says. “The first thing that s laid out is the figure, and then I build the landscape around it. So it s very much paying attention to the body positioning, and what emotion that is communicating.”