A ticket to dreamland Some photographers have always envied painters’ abilities to portray more than what appears in front of them. For that, Tom Chambers has a seamless Photoshop solution, placing girls in bleak landscapes where they are surrounded by bi
THE WORK OF TOM CHAMBERS
THE figures in Tom Chambers’ photomontaged images do inexplicable things under cloudy skies. The framed works now hanging at Photo-Eye Gallery display a great range in both setting and activity, but every one exudes a sense of magic. The photomontage images are featured in Tom Chambers: Hearts and Bones, a retrospective exhibition gleaned from more than 25 years of work that hangs at Photo-eye Gallery, through Feb. 16. They can also be seen in the new book Hearts and Bones: A Retrospective of Tom Chambers’ Photomontage Art (Unicorn Publishing Group).
During the mid-1980s, when Chambers pursued his bachelor of fine arts degree at the Ringling College of Art in Sarasota, Florida, a teacher named Osgood was responsible for a significant formative impact. “He was from New York City, and he was friends with Andy Warhol, and he had all these stories about New York City during the ’60s,” he said. “He was just kind of a crazy guy who pushed us to do stuff out of the ordinary. The more bizarre, the better he liked it. He pushed me to come up with some different stuff. That was before digital.”
Before the advent of Photoshop, which facilitates a myriad of digital-image modifications, the photographer was limited to making changes mechanically, under the enlarger or via paintbrush or physically cutting and pasting. “In art school, we used a lot of darkroom tricks, which I liked. I was going to school for a graphic design degree, but I had an emphasis in photography. It’s kind of strange to see some of the illustrations I was doing back then, and the photography I’m doing right now is very similar, with the animals and kids. In illustration class, we would take cameras and go out and shoot elements and pieces and backgrounds, and we would print them, but we would take that image and paint it into our painting. In other words, we would use a lucy machine [luciograph] — you put the photo in the machine, and on the top you could trace the image, and then you could take that tracing and overlay it on a painting. That’s kind of like what I’m doing now, shooting different elements and combining them in Photoshop.”
Garden Gate is an image from his first photomontage series. A fawn pauses on stone steps below a gate in a fern- and moss-carpeted rock wall. The photograph’s rich world of color and texture contrasts with One Oar Out, in which we see a girl standing in a solitary boat surrounded by an icy sea. Stone and Sand boasts one of Chambers’ typically desolate settings, a landscape he shot in Iceland. A girl sits at the base of a large, chain-wrapped stone cairn, holding a songbird, while several other bird types perch and fly nearby.
Most of the artist’s thematic arrangements are strikingly unlikely, like the girl clad in leaves who appears to be arranging live birds on a mossy rock (Hidden Aviary); the tiger calmly walking along a cobblestone street (Edge of a Dream); and the barefoot girl holding a clutch of cut branches with a small fire at one end and a bird flying into a nest at the other (Fire and Ice).
In the frame of Fowl Play, a girl strolls through a luxuriantly verdant landscape of grasses and small flowers, while terns fill the sky. “That was Iceland, and birds kind of rule Iceland,” Chambers said. “There’s not much as far as wildlife. There are foxes, and there are sheep everywhere. Those particular birds were attacking me. If you get too close to the nests, and you can’t tell where the nests are, they’ll bomb you. The terrain in Iceland is volcanic rock and moss grows on top. It’s pretty much impossible to walk on it because it’s very spongy and the rock has holes you can fall into. It’s a stark landscape that’s beautiful at the same time.”
Fowl Play is one in a Chambers series called To The Edge. The images are all from Iceland, and each picture includes a meandering line of text floating above the horizon. “I wanted to put poetry into the image as a design element. I have a friend here in Richmond, Allen Chamberlain, and she wrote a poem based on my images from Iceland. The poem is a ghazal, a Persian form written in couplets.
Another friend did the calligraphy. So for that series I worked with two other artists.”
Chambers, who grew up in the Amish farm country of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, gets his ideas from many sources. He’s influenced by films, other photographers, and writers — not unexpectedly, he loves Isabel Allende’s novels in the domain of magical realism, but his list of favorite authors also includes Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy. “I’ll get ideas looking at movies or reading these books, and usually before I fall asleep, when I’m in a relaxed state, I’ll start thinking about something and let the images rattle through my brain. If I come up with something I think will work, I’ll get up and make a quick sketch.”
Chambers uses his Nikon D800 to pursue the photography of particular elements for each image, but he will also shoot anything else that catches his eye, for later use. And he haunts stores that stock unusual items. An example is the stuffed coyote sitting next to the girl in Not
Now. “There’s a place here in Richmond that sells taxidermy,” he said. “It’s a shop for the goth crowd, so there are a lot of interesting things for photography, including skulls and stuffed animals.”
If viewers are seeking meaning in his works, they may often be confounded, or at least challenged. But his methodology also makes it fun to view them and discover nearly hidden elements. The main subject of Hide Your Eyes is a girl with a hooded hawk on her wrist partially lifting a blindfold. There are birds here and there, and two rabbits camouflaged in the grass. The hawk was a stuffed bird Chambers found in a case at a hawk sanctuary.
“Hide Your Eyes is one of a very new series. I have seven completed right now and three are at the gallery for this show. I wanted to shake up my work, to do something totally different. I set parameters. I decided they would be full-length portraits, all the same size, all looking directly ahead, all with the horizon line at knee height so it would be mostly sky, and the colors would be muted.”
Another of his newest pictures is Nesting With Scissors. Here is a young lady standing, looking out of the frame at us as she cuts her hair with a large pair of scissors. She has a sad look on her face. Sparrows are harvesting the cut hair in midair and on the ground, using it to improve their nest. Chambers said he has not yet nailed down the artistic statement for this new series. The parameters limit the basic look of the photos, so the story is told purely by means of the other elements and the action. “I don’t know the name of the series yet. It has to do with storytelling and maybe heroines, because I think this will be all girls.”