ALAMEDA ON CAMERA 2026

Eyes on the Island

 

By Karen Braun Malpas

 

Once a year The Frank Bette Center invites 48 artists to roam the island taking pictures of what presents itself in their assigned 1/48th of the map. They then have a month in which to make something wonderful from their findings. This show is what they made.

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LIGHT offers itself to these photographers by day and night.  Robert Hamner took a picture of a “Cedar St. Turret” but it is the illuminated fluffy albino tree in front of it that captures our imagination. Juanito Ellingson caught a lone biker at the beach (“Lobo Solitario”) in a private moment as he faces of a fading sun, absorbing its last warmth.  The row of emotionless buildings in Bonnie Blake-Drucker’s “Abandoned by Starlight” do the same, passively facing the light of the inevitable.

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Lights twinkle on a distant shore of “The Headlands” in which Lori Hale evokes Gatsby’s parties. Scott Kozinchik squinted into the bright spotlight of a “Sunday Night Courtyard” in an otherwise dark night…it may deter vandals but is certain to irritate neighbors.  Ryan Lanthier abstracted “Jeffs Place” into a sweet string of green lights with reflected green tails. Briana Berger isolates a view of materials in and out of shallow water (“Beneath the Surface”) resulting in a poetically textured yin-yang image.

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Curiously, the color PINK makes itself seen repeatedly. “Firm Sand, Soft City” is Tamar Piehler pinkifying the golden hour.  Similarly, Ivan Baxarias‘ “Low Tide Glow” is a large, spare hushed image prefacing nightfall. Mark Vincent dignified a faded old pink chair by taking its portrait and naming it “The Quiet Chair.” Also, past its prime is Andrea Pook’s pink surfboard leaning in a corner of the garden now grown over by vines, “Garden Surfing.” Mark Vincent saw a putty pink building being swallowed and dominated by its neighbor, a bright “Wild Orange” shop with an equally pugnacious orange car parked in front of it.

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While many of the photos depict straight forward subjects, others pose visual MYSTERIES rife with AMBIGUITY and ENIGMA.  In Jim DuPont’s “Lunar Dancing Girl” the setting is static but he appears to have captured the fleeting illusion of an angel spinning there. In Liz Garone’s “Garden Party” she nonchalantly shows us garden statuary wherein the boy rudely grabs the skirt of his female companion but…does that really warrant her whacking his head off and carrying it in her basket of other produce?  Andy McKee shows us the absolutely most unlikely garden plot where greenery is sprouting aggressively up from a deep dark hole In the concrete, the opposite of fertile terrain,” Cement Springs.”

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BIRDS “In Flight” sailed over Susan Hillyard in formation determined by science or joy?  The image Lukas Yap made of a flock of birds dotting the space under a bridge makes us wonder if they are soaring up or falling down as it evokes the image of the jumper on 9/11.  In “Turkey Crossing” Stephanie Williamson shows us a beautifully detailed Audubonesque turkey dragging his shadow around, wondering why it keeps following him.