Intemporelle
Photographs by Gary Watson
Exhibition dates: May 1 - July 1
At the Alliance Française of Houston
Opening time: Monday to Friday 9:30am-1:00pm
Gary Watson, Photographer
After a decades-long career as an award-winning filmmaker, Gary Watson has embraced the analog photographic process in a time of ubiquitous digital imaging. Using vintage cameras and working in 8x10, 4x5, medium format, and 35mm film, he creates dramatic black-and-white art images ranging from studio studies to photojournalism. This choice of medium reflects Gary’s belief that creative works should have durability. Photography captures fleeting moments in time, preserving those images as a record of who we are, where we live, and what we do, and creating a continuity of our visual history. Gary believes creating these “time portals” is best accomplished with a medium that is physical rather than ephemeral.
Artist statement
It is as simple as this. My intention is to present photographs that are honest, that are most often about something, that are sometimes entertaining, and that are always intended to be catalysts for emotional responses and thoughtful discussion. They are photographs of dreams and nightmares, love and hate, joy and despair, sense and nonsense, objects and ephemera, yesterdays and tomorrows. They are the forward motion of time arrested by the trip of a shutter and recorded through venerable optics on seasoned devices that apply a veneer of timelessness.
It is fitting that France, the subject of this exhibition as well as the birthplace of photography, is itself timeless. It is a world where the chansons of Piaf and Greco are still sung by Zaz and Zaho, where the films of the Lumière Brothers and Méliès gave birth to the New Wave cinema, where the first photograph by Niépce led to the first cell phone transmission of a photo, and where the centuries-old Notre-Dame de Paris was restored after a devastating fire using ancient techniques aided by digital 3D modeling. It is a country where the past, present, and future co-exist, where tradition meets modernity.
The past gives birth to the future. Today will be tomorrow’s yesterday. But honest photographs will not let the past fade away.