Emily Passino, Love Circle
New Years Salon Resolutions
Happy New Year all!
While the past year for the Salon was about building this place and building a base of knowledge, the plan is for this year to be more about building relationships and getting to know each other better.
We have this virtual wall to deal with, but it’s been great to see that breaking down over time and I’m confident we can accelerate that this year.
We’re going to work on getting more regular hangouts within the groups and just more regular talks. I think the friendships made here are the most important element of this place and the more we can foster those, the more everything else will fall into place.
The other focus will be consistency. Consistency, whenever possible, is the key to photography, and I think this is similar for the Salon.
While we build out consistency on the Salon’s end, we’d love it if you’d be able to work on the consistency on your end as much as possible, both with your work and with the site. And we realize that this sometimes might not mesh with the responsibilities of everyday life, but as best you can.
Larry Felton, Albany
This is a time for us all to grow these relationships, have fun with each other, and help each other out.
We’ll schedule a posting and engagement hangout soon, but we’d love it if you could check into the site even when you don’t have anything to post. Check in for inspiration and to give others comments. Work on putting yourself out there more, helping out, and it will all start to come around back to you and all of us.
Building relationships over the web feels very strange at first, but by the end of 2022, I’m hopeful that this will all feel second nature. It already has started to. And long term, we want a good mix of building these relationships through the hangouts, on the site, and eventually whenever this pandemic finally subsides, in person.
Now one important thing that has been growing behind the scenes this year, and ramping up in the second half, has been an inspiring group of people working to make this place what it is. We’re going to highlight all of them soon so you can get to know them better, but for today, I want to give a better introduction to Emily Passino and Larry Felton, two amazing people who have been bedrocks in creating the structure and spirit of this place from the very beginning. Emily is the moderator of group Levitt and Larry of group Koudelka, the two initial beta groups.
So much of how this place has grown (and will grow this year) is due to them.
I asked both Emily and Larry a few questions to answer so we can get to know them better. Here’s what they wrote!
Emily Passino
“I learned about photography growing up, with my dad and his darkroom and his strong opinions.
For years photography was catch-as-catch-can, with no formal intentions, or education, or understanding of much of anything. About 15 years ago, though, I happened to attend a talk on street photography at a local art gallery, where two things happened. First, I saw classic examples of this genre and was totally intrigued. Second, a friend who was also there invited me to join a small informal group of photographers, who were lively and talented and generous and knowledgeable.
These days, in addition to the Photo Salon, I am active in three local photography groups – the group mentioned above; a collective of street photographers; and a smaller group with diverse styles. Before COVID, I led a regular “photo dialogue” workshop for a community group (people with early Alzheimer’s).
My professional life was rich and demanding so that photography was limited to odd bursts of energy in between everything else. For 30+ years, I was an internal management consultant for the State of Tennessee, advising cabinet/senior leadership on strategy, process improvement, performance measures, employee engagement and other jargon-y sounding things. But the truth is, this gave me a chance to work on issues that mattered, with people who cared, at all levels, all across the state. I learned the complexities involved with prisons, state parks, highway patrol, child protection, the environment, public health, mental health – even licensing engineers and barbers, and empowering housekeeping staff. It was all very fascinating and felt worthwhile.
As I got closer to retirement (and coincidentally all 3 offspring were out on their own, another angle of the rich and full life in the previous decades), I started making time for photography workshops and classes and more regular visits to galleries and museums.
Which brings me to the Salon, and the Love Circle Project.
With the Salon, the project I’m working on is evolving, but it is based around a small, odd word-of-mouth park in my neighborhood, which has both panoramic views of the city, and an assortment of undisguised, unappealing water and renewable energy utilities. I originally went there to get a long view of downtown. After the first visit, which was in winter, I made a point of trying to visit Love Circle in other seasons. I was surprised that people were seemingly just hanging out there, despite the bizarre mechanical “stuff” all over the hill. And NOBODY seemed to take notice of the pumping stations, and mechanical “stuff” all over the hill.
Looking back through the photos I had collected from these visits last year, I saw an assortment of people, views, activities – not yet adding up to anything, but with potential. I’m now spending more time, more regularly, “experiencing” Love Circle. I’ve been able to strike up a few conversations, to attend to the sounds and feeling of the place, and just more intentionally observe it. Love Circle itself might turn out to be “the” project, or it might fit into other concepts I’ve been exploring, such as where and how people seek “refuge from daily life.”
Favorite photographers: Graciella Iturbide, Sally Mann, William Eggleston, Garry Winogrand, Dayanita Singh, Jeremiah Ariaz, Carrie Weems, Mark Steinmetz – in the random order they came to my mind.
Tidbit: The other interest my father shared with me was learning how to fly a small Cessna airplane, so I have a handful of solo flights in my past.”
Larry Felton
“After going to college for engineering, I’ve worked in the semiconductor industry for thirty years. My jobs have always required long trips overseas, so I took up photography as something to do on weekends when I was stuck in a hotel somewhere in Europe or Asia. I started with travel photography, but somewhere along the line, I stumbled across street photography and was immediately hooked. I’d shoot mostly while I traveled because I could never find anything interesting here at home in Albany, NY.
For most of the last ten years, I’ve worked for a Japanese company, so I’ve spent many of those weekends away from home in Tokyo. Of course, Tokyo is a spectacular city for street photography; I would regularly shoot the same streets that Daido Moriyama still shoots today. The problem was that I was taking the same pictures everyone else was taking. There wasn’t much of me in the pictures.
While there in Tokyo, I came across the Japanese aesthetic wabi-sabi, which is the experience of finding beauty in the impermanent, imperfect, and incomplete. Things I’ve experienced that might evoke wabi-sabi include an exclusive sushi restaurant serving sake out of chipped, mismatched cups, an eight-seat jazz bar that plays only vinyl records made before 1960, and handmade quilts airing over balcony railings of run-down houses in old Tokyo. A couple of years ago, I decided to spend my time shooting in Japan focusing on wabi-sabi. Shooting it took me to different parts of Tokyo, away from the crowds in Shinjuku and Ginza. I’d be doing something different than most foreigners in Japan.
Then Covid hit, and I haven’t been back to Japan since March of 2020. Finding myself stranded in Albany, I decided to make the best of it and started to shoot things I found in here that evoked wabi-sabi for me; around the same time, James started Close to Home. Over the last twenty months, I’ve started to see Albany through different eyes. I’m not shooting wabi-sabi exactly. That is impossible because I am not Japanese, and Albany is not Japan. But with those ideas in mind, I’ve finally made some pictures that are truly mine. I’ve realized that I need to be in a place that is part of me to do my best work.
As I’ve shifted my focus to shooting in a small town, I’ve begun to look at work from photographers the usual image of street photography. The work that most strongly influences me now is from photographers like Todd Hido, Alec Soth and William Eggleston, people that have found worthy subjects outside big cities.
Like so many others, the experience of the last couple of years has led me to reassess what I want to be doing with my time. In my case, it led me to decide to retire. One consequence of that decision is I won’t be traveling to Tokyo as often. From here on out, I’ll be shooting mostly in Albany.”
