Textbook editor and photographer Martha Weintraub employs Photoshop to bring the whimsy of children’s fantasy books to digital prints.
By: Susan Van Dongen
To Photoshop or not to Photoshop? That is the question for a certain generation of photographers who are excited by the new technology available, but feel a certain loyalty to traditional printing techniques.
Martha Weintraub has fallen in love with Photoshop and doesn’t have any qualms about tinkering with and tweaking her images. The Hillsborough resident took to the technology like a fish to the water, or maybe judging from her love for avians, like a bird to a tree.
Along with Rhoda Kassof-Isaac, Ms. Weintraub will show her work at Gallery 14 in Hopewell. The two-woman show, Photographs from the Imagination, runs Sept. 8 to Oct. 8, with a special opening reception to celebrate the gallery’s fifth anniversary.
For Ms. Weintraub, the exhibit will be a chance to reveal the images she’s painstakingly assembled, dream-like works that twist and intoxicate the imagination, and also make the viewer laugh. Photography lovers may be reminded a bit of Jerry Uelsmann’s otherworldly works except Ms. Weintraub notes that unlike herself, Mr. Uelsmann is still a purist of the darkroom, and a magician as well. She feels a little more comfortable naming Maggie Taylor as an influence, a photographer as well as Mr. Uelsmann’s wife, who works wonders with digital technology.
"Except for one image in which I actually drew a cage, they’re combinations of photos I’ve taken," Ms. Weintraub says. "I used Photoshop to put the whole thing together, and that can be very complicated or not, depending on how many elements there are in the image, and what you do with those elements."
One piece, "Hope Floats Over a Great Gathering of Birds" began as a combination of a photo of trees and a shot of a blackbird in Ms. Weintraub’s backyard. Like a still from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, the trees are dark with clones of that blackbird, which the photographer painstakingly perched on the limbs in different directions. She also colored the birds in a variety of sizes and subtle shades. (One at the very top is bright yellow not so subtle.)
"I was very careful, I got really close in (to the image) so his feet are actually placed on the limbs," Ms. Weintraub says.
Another photo, which Ms. Weintraub originally took at the Uffizi gallery in Italy, has sly humor to it, maybe even a touch of Dada. Amid the stone walls and classical statuary is a niche that holds a whimsical flamingo. The photographer carefully removed the real work of sacred art that was in the space and Photoshopped the straw bird in there instead. She titled it "Her Own Niche at the Uffizi Gallery How She’s Risen in Life!"
"Birds, wings, eggs in the images take on different roles omens, ghosts, freedom, rebirth," she writes in her artist’s statement. "Birds Revel at Mardis Gras in St. Mark’s Square," for example, is a composite of the famous church in Venice, Italy, along with many ornamental birds. There is lots of yin and yang here dark, gothic stone contrasts with colorful birds, high church art in sculpture contrasts with trailer park kitsch in flamingoes.
"Other photographs of this famous square often include the many birds (that flock there), photographed in flight or being fed," Ms. Weintraub says. "While birds often represent freedom, most of the birds in (my) image are clearly flightless. The birds also wear masks, referring to Mardi Gras, which is of course about partying before the restrictions of Lent. Look at this image for a while, and you may see other connections."
Pairing Ms. Weintraub with Ms. Kassof-Isaac was a stroke of genius, since both women revel in creating photographs that are a vision of an internal world of their own making and imaginations. They use materials from the tangible world to create their own artistic expressions which begin with but are not limited by photographs and photographic techniques.
Ms. Kassof-Isaac, a founding member of Gallery 14, began her artistic career as a painter, and has lived, painted, taught, studied and exhibited in both Europe and the United States. She lovingly embraced photography, but maintains her roots as a painter by enhancing her already painterly images with brushstrokes and other hands-on work.
"The challenge of photography for me is to take a photograph either in a single or a double exposure and then to add my own hand with brush or computer," she writes in her artist’s statement. "Thus the picture becomes more than what the camera allows us to see in the environment or in nature. I play with colors, moods and hidden and not-so-hidden surprises. My goal is to take the viewer on a journey into the intrinsic world of my art."
"When looking at these images, one can ask what is true," Ms. Kassof-Isaac continues. "What is not true? The answer is not so simple, because truth can change. Reality may be once or twice removed."
These two artists share a similar language of visual expression that comes from deeper sources than seen on the surface. Both artists use what they see in nature, places, objects, and people and they then combine images, change dimensions, alter colors, layer and blend to create new worlds. The images contain a sense of wonder that can take the viewer to new places in time and space, or narrative threads which viewers may weave into their own stories.
For Ms. Weintraub, who has always had a love for children’s books, storytelling is an unavoidable element of her photography. Even the titles of her works conjure memories of fantastic tales. One piece, "Flights of Fancy May Be Found Within Stories and Poem," uses classic children’s books for subject matter.
Layering a fanciful scene on an open page set against an ethereal blue sky, it’s as though the book is open to an Alice-in-Wonderland world, just waiting for the reader to plunge into.
"When I wake up early in the morning, there is an image or a fragment of an image in my head like the residue of a dream," she says. "I don’t know where the images come from, but I immediately go to the computer or camera, and begin creating."
Ms. Weintraub has been a member of Gallery 14 since March 2005 and has been working enthusiastically in digital photography since 2003. Perhaps the detailed work she does with Photoshop and other software appeals to the editor in Ms. Weintraub she’s been an editor of educational textbooks at Houghton Mifflin for a number of years. She’s the significant other of photographer David "Smoky" Wurtzel, who showed a collection of black-and-white images from Antarctica at Gallery 14 last spring. The trip to the snowy clime was just one of the couple’s foreign excursions, where they both take their cameras and enthusiastically make pictures.
"I do a lot of other kinds of photography, more straightforward shots of our travels, for example," Ms. Weintraub says. "But it’s hard for me to leave (my photographs) alone. It’s interesting to hear criticism of images that are obviously Photoshopped. Change is hard and that’s what’s going on in the photography world. Everything is going digital but there’s still this tug to keep things ‘traditional.’ But there are more and more people exploring what they can do with the technology. To me, it’s just another tool for making art."
Photographs from the Imagination, photography by Martha Weintraub and Rhoda Kassoff-Isaac, is on view at Gallery 14, 14 Mercer Street, Hopewell, Sept. 8-Oct. 8. Opening reception, Sept. 8, 6-9 p.m. Gallery hours: Sat.-Sun., noon-5 p.m. or by appointment. For information, call (609) 333-8311. On the Web: www.photosgallery14.com. Martha Weintraub on the Web: www.marthaweintraub.com