The 2024 Annual National Open Juried Exhibition runs from September 30 through November 22
Christine Acebo
Featured Artist working With Photography and Anthotype Prints
I grew up with a father who always had some kind of camera with him, and I remember the first photo I took, of my dog, with a little Brownie, in grade school. After college, I became serious about photography, originally working with film cameras but fully embracing digital photography in the late 1990s. I was an early member of the photo-sharing site, Flickr, and, as a discipline, I have posted roughly one photo a day to my Flickr photostream since 2005. My body of work is extensive, evolving over more than 40 years of active pursuit. My showcase website includes much of what I consider my best images and some short vignettes to accompany some of my photos, my way of blending visual and verbal imagery, right and left brain in concert.
I retired in 2019 after a career as a behavioral research scientist studying sleep and circadian rhythms, primarily in children and adolescents. My science and photography required me to develop and hone my abilities to observe, be it patterns of behavior, patterns
of light and darkness, the detail of a caterpillar's skin, or the stretch of a mountain range below storm clouds. Both have also enabled me to visit that magical place where the intensity of focus puts me squarely in the present moment and utterly involved with the object of that focus.
I seek to portray the drama in the world around me, whether in the interplay of light and dark in city nightscapes, in the shadows and deep rich old-world colors in indirectly lit rooms, or small instantaneous moments of street life. I aim to capture images that might suggest stories or that lead the viewer to their own stories or into their imaginations. I'm not a purist and alter my photos at will. I figure the first alteration to the scene comes when I pull out my camera and choose my frame; the second comes when I choose the settings. It's all down or up-hill from there.