Stefynie Rosenfeld says, "It wasn’t until I got my first digital camera that my photographic hobby became an artistic and spiritual journey.  My works have explored the intricacies of the human condition, the blurred lines between the literal and surreal, the passage of time, and the spiritual beauty of the natural world.  They are reflections of encounters I've had with people and places whose emotions go beyond words and are best expressed visually.  

Through photography I have found the profundity of any given moment is always there, and who we are and what we bring to a situation allows the artistry to happen."

www.take2films.wix.com/throughmylens
 

Natalie van Sambeck says of her series 'Coming Home',  "Home is very much a state of mind. Whether we define this in terms of  people, places or inanimate objects, it makes no difference.  Home is our sanctuary.  A place where we can go to for comfort, peace, or even solitude.  We are greeted by our self every time we connect to home and it is here that we begin to get a sense for who we truly are.  In this sense home and self become intrinsically intertwined; never fully being constant.
 
My home is a sacred place nestled in the forest just off a slightly beaten path behind my family’s house.  This place is where I spent most of my childhood days hunting for frogs or crayfish, building forts in trees, stomping on skunk cabbage, or looking up and counting all the stars when night began to fall.  I’ve shed some tears  and revealed some of my deepest secrets with these woods.  It holds my hopes, my dreams, and even my fears. In essence, my self is imprinted within this place; a sacred space I call home. 

Each print is hand made using a 19th century photographic printing method called gum bichromate.  This process requires multiples layers that are all hand coated to create a full colored image that is a one-of-a-kind handcrafted piece of art.  Neither grounded in reality or fantasy, the soft desaturated color scheme and painterly aesthetics work together to enhance a dreamlike state of being that reveals the pathway for Coming Home."

As an artist, Natalie van Sambeck is inspired by the natural world and mankind’s relationship to nature. Influenced by the teachings of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, van Sambeck offers a unique perspective that challenges conventional ways of thinking about the broader issues surrounding home, identity, the human condition, and our relationship to nature.  With an emphasis in alternative processes and self portraiture, van Sambeck creates unique handcrafted works of art that offers her distinctive vision.

Career Highlights-
Exhibitions


2018 Alternative Processes Show, Soho Photo Gallery  
2016    Annual Members’ Show, PhotoSynthesis, East Hartford, CT
2015   Annual Members’ Show, PhotoSynthesis, East Hartford, CT

Awards-
2017   Finalist, Photographer’s Forum, Best of College & High School
2016    Finalist, Photographer’s Forum, Best of College & High School
2015   Finalist, Photographer’s Forum, Best of Photography 
Finalist, Photographer’s Forum, Best of College & High School                    
Publications-
2017  The Golden Section VS The Rule of Thirds,”  AAU Lens, May 5, 2017
http://www.aaulens.com/blog/2017/1/25/the-golden-section-vs-the-rule-of-thirds?rq=natalie%20van%20Sambeck
“The Artist’s Voice: Speaking Our Own Truth,”  AAU Lens, March 17, 2017
http://www.aaulens.com/blog/2017/1/25/the-artists-voice-speaking-our-own-truth?rq=natalie%20van%20Sambeck
www.nvansambeck.art

Barbara Tyroler says, "Family portraiture weaves its way through our daily lives, encased in a wedding family album, a sacred box, a mouse pad, or the back pocket of a pair of jeans. It may inhabit a death portrait or a sonogram. Laced with a myriad of shifting projected recollections, it traffics innocence and desire, nightmare memories, sentimentality, alienation, connection.

Family photographs enable the reconstruction of personal memories, facilitating connections and disruptions in the search for intimacy and familial identity. Beneath the surface of the family frame, past the sacred precinct of seemingly impenetrable facade, and into the zone of the frozen past, the fluidity of memory subordinates ritual to construct its own mythology.

Two years ago when my mother was dying, drowning in her own fluids from congestive heart failure, I was photographing kids from the local community center as they were learning to swim and regulate their breathing patterns under water. While photographing, I watched those children struggle with fear and later express such exuberance as they worked through these challenges.

As my mother was dying, I was photographing children learning how to survive. I never photographed my mother on the day of her death, only the swimmers. But when my friend Ruth summoned me one summer day to document her own mother's final hours, I immediately grabbed my gear and hopped on the Beltway to be there for her.

It has been over 10 years and still Ruth has not looked at these photos. She can't bear it. She says she's glad she has this testamentary; swirling and floating on 2 gold archival disks, recombining fragments and specks of ancient ancestral connection, locked in a special treasure box in her basement. Soon it will all become unreadable as the technology becomes obsolete, bits of indecipherable data...  Maybe this doesn't really matter to her...

I entered this project, Mothers, Daughters, and the Writers Life, having met a new colleague/friend and rediscovered an old colleague/friend/kindred spirit. We began our collaborative journey as seasoned artists who use writing and photography to inspire memory and search for meaning. With mothers and daughters as the central theme, we have extended our journey with a group of writers to articulate these intimate spaces between daughters and mothers.

My series of images in the Writing Life is the result of an ongoing portrait project that blends my own photographs with heirlooms from family archives, the snaps and snippets of one’s life as photographed by family and friends. This work is about the heart work of families, though the aesthetics of light and shadow, doors and cobwebs, and objects symbolic of transitions and memories, of loss and love.

The highlights of my own life have come sometimes without my awareness of the events. Certainly being hired as a university professor, obtaining a second masters degree, the birth of our daughter, my marriage, every honor or award as a signifier of achievement and external recognition for creativity or technical mastery claims a spot on this continuum. And now, in this final phase as I reflect on professional and personal accomplishments, I realize that pursuing a life of integrity with continuous growth is what enables the contributions and meaning that could be considered the highlights of my life.

 www.barbaratyroler.com


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