A Change of Mind:
An Alzheimer's Portrait
Portraits:
Lesbian & Gay Couples
Italy
Lulu
Coney Island
Secret Soul of Things
Celebrities
Corporate
Event Photography
From Review
"A Painter and a Photographer Push Color To Its Limits"
By Helen Harrison, The New York Times, 1980
Joyce Culver, a photographer who teaches at Southampton College, proves that the camera is not necessarily an objective recording device. By the judicious use of darkroom technique, she manipulates her images to enhance some qualities and suppress others, so that the resulting prints define and interpret her observations.
Seen through Miss Culver's eyes, an unassuming stone or shrub achieves a supernatural presence. She is attracted by normally contrasting subjects, such as a fluorescent painted rock against a dark background or a golden bush set in a predominantly green garden, but she is not content merely to reproduce the selected phenomena.
At her urging, contrasts are subtly but definitely intensified. Apples hanging on dark, leafless branches appear to stand out from their somber surroundings, their red ripeness emphasized but not overplayed. Clumps of azure moss spring with surprising intensity from the deep browns of rocks.
In each case, Miss Culver used initial photographs as a point of departure rather than an end in itself. However, unlike a painter or sculptor, who is free to distort and even destroy the original subject, she has chosen to limit her manipulation through the heightening of visual effects within the framework of photographic observation.
By combining astute selection and technical sleight of hand, Miss Culver focuses attention in new and exciting ways. For example, a beautifully detailed iron fence, its grapevine decoration picked out in purple and blue paint, is subdued to almost the same tonal value as its shadowy background, except for the heightening of its leaf pattern.
Miss Culver's photographs are highly subjective visual statements in which natural and manmade objects engage in a provocative interplay of form and texture.
"A Painter and a Photographer Push Color To Its Limits"
By Helen Harrison, The New York Times, 1980
Joyce Culver, a photographer who teaches at Southampton College, proves that the camera is not necessarily an objective recording device. By the judicious use of darkroom technique, she manipulates her images to enhance some qualities and suppress others, so that the resulting prints define and interpret her observations.
Seen through Miss Culver's eyes, an unassuming stone or shrub achieves a supernatural presence. She is attracted by normally contrasting subjects, such as a fluorescent painted rock against a dark background or a golden bush set in a predominantly green garden, but she is not content merely to reproduce the selected phenomena.
At her urging, contrasts are subtly but definitely intensified. Apples hanging on dark, leafless branches appear to stand out from their somber surroundings, their red ripeness emphasized but not overplayed. Clumps of azure moss spring with surprising intensity from the deep browns of rocks.
In each case, Miss Culver used initial photographs as a point of departure rather than an end in itself. However, unlike a painter or sculptor, who is free to distort and even destroy the original subject, she has chosen to limit her manipulation through the heightening of visual effects within the framework of photographic observation.
By combining astute selection and technical sleight of hand, Miss Culver focuses attention in new and exciting ways. For example, a beautifully detailed iron fence, its grapevine decoration picked out in purple and blue paint, is subdued to almost the same tonal value as its shadowy background, except for the heightening of its leaf pattern.
Miss Culver's photographs are highly subjective visual statements in which natural and manmade objects engage in a provocative interplay of form and texture.
