Roger Fremier
He currently exhibits black-and-white photographs of landscapes and man-made objects, and has had over 50 group and solo exhibits in such galleries as the Fresno City Art Museum, the Spectrum Gallery, the Center of Photography in Woodstock, New York, and the Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery and the Monterey Museum of Art. He heads the Department of Photography at Monterey Peninsula College, and continues to teach workshops through Photographs II in Carmel. In 2001 he will teach a series of International Photography Retreats in England, France, Spain and Japan. Amherst Media Publishers will soon publish his upcoming book, PhotoStorming. His work is in the permanent collection of the Monterey Museum of Art, the David McAlpin Private Collection, Hartnell College in Salinas, and the National Portrait Gallery in London. The Silver Light Gallery in Carmel represents him. "The more we are surrounded by moving images, as the presence in our daily lives of movies, television and digital imagery accelerates, the more we can see the black-and-white photograph for what it is: a creation, a fiction, and intensification of experience. What once seemed to be reality--the truth captured by the camera--may now be enjoyed as a classic art. By limiting the visual field through the viewfinder, by strict ordering and balancing of compositional elements, by flirting with abstraction while scrutinizing nature, and by heightening contrast in either soft or dramatic lighting situations, a 'separate' experience is created, something apart from the flow of our everyday reality. "My long experience in commercial as well as artistic photography has given me the technical expertise to work at creating controlled yet expressive prints, which I hope not only convey the beauty and mystery of the subjects I love to photograph, but also create satisfying art objects on their own terms. I am the product of a modern tradition of photography that began with Paul Strand and Edward Weston, who succeeded in communicating their subject while affecting the viewer with a modern visual language of pure shapes and relationships of black-and-white tones. For me, the absence of color intensifies the awareness of light and form. The drama of dark and light is experienced directly, and the suggestions that accompany geometric forms cannot entirely be analyzed. "I feel fortunate to have traveled with my craft to different parts of the Western landscape and to Europe. My body of work, 'Selections', is a cross-section of man-made and natural subjects I have encountered. I am drawn to the interaction of light and geometry in historical architecture, and the vitality of natural forms in details as well as in the wider view. I feel that these black-and white images in the classical mode, enhanced 'selections' from all that we see, convey a part of the mystery of our experience." Below is an example of Roger Fremier's work. Additional photos appear in our Photo Gallery.
Waterfall
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