Opening Night

Last night I was at the Pontiac Creative Arts Center for the opening of their photography exhibition. I have three works hanging there, including this one:

Owsley Fork #3 (©2010 Richard X. Moore)

And this one:

Unnamed Stream #4 (©2010 Richard X. Moore)

And this:

Owsley Fork #1 (©2009 Richard X. Moore)

This is only the second time I’ve shown my work publicly, and the first time where it could have actually been rejected, which it obviously wasn’t. I went down there not quite knowing what to expect from the experience, a little nervous in fact. In the past, I’ve tended to keep my creative mind walled off from the rest of my life and it’s only in the last year or so that this wall has started to come down. Intellectually I knew that my work didn’t mean much if I were the only one to see it, if it existed only on my hard drive or a few random prints hung up on my wall. Still, setting it free meant losing control of it and exposing it to………well, to what? I’m not sure anymore what it was I was so worried about.

The Creative Arts Center is a wonderful old building dating back to the late 1800s, a theater-like main floor with a balcony that wrapped around on three sides. It was, I’m told, the original Pontiac Public library. It’s an inviting exhibit space, spacious and well-lit but still intimate.  My work was placed on both levels, each image independent of the others, standing on its own among the works of other photographers. Some of the images were very good,  a few were great. They covered the spectrum from black-and-white documentary images to digital art. I was really impressed by the overall quality of the show and pleased that I got to share space with a lot of the work I saw there. I had interesting conversations with some smart and talented people that I hope to see again.

It was a little  surreal to watch from the balcony as people lingered over my photographs below. Part of me wanted to run downstairs and ask them what they saw in there, but for the most part I was content to let my work breathe on its own. It was no longer mine alone. Every pair of eyes that rested on those images carried a little bit of them away.  That was the point. That was very nearly everything I needed from this night.