Galleries : Colorful Approach
By Sue Dawson, manager, Alison Shaw Gallery, Dukes County Ave., Oak Bluffs
Published: July 17, 2008
Photographer Alison Shaw and I are always thinking about new ways to present her work. We tell ourselves this is for our audience - the people who come in to our gallery, or peruse the websites. But sometimes I wonder if it's just our way of keeping things fun and creative, constantly reinventing the work. This spring, Alison had the idea of doing color shows.
Organizing her 30-plus years of photographs by colors has allowed me to include in one show images from all of her different series over the years, unified by color. I'll sit at the computer and "play," as I call it, cropping and re-sizing images from earlier years, finding photos we've never printed and hanging them together in different combinations. And the main display wall gets painted a different vibrant color every two weeks, to demonstrate the show's name.
At our opening receptions, we serve color-themed food and drinks, paint the walls the corresponding color, and having a blast doing it.
Especially this year, many people are asking how Alison gets such saturation of color in her work. Some even find it impossible to believe these images are real, and insist that we pull these intense colors out of thin air, in Photoshop. One of these days I'm going to put some of the chromes on a light table so customers can see it's all in the original shot.
Alison answers the doubters simply, by referring to her subject matter: "It's there - you just have to look."
Photo courtesy of Sue Dawson
