MFA students host exhibit in McConnell Library
An exhibition featuring three Master of Fine Arts (MFA) photography students officially opened at Radford University on Oct. 4 in McConnell Library.
The exhibition, which features works by Leslie King, Kaitlynn Slaughter and Langley Anderson, displays photographs with three different – and unique – styles.
One method – piezography – was used by King. Piezography is a fine-art black and white digital process, now in use for 16 years. The digital process imitates a traditional photographic method. King used the method to print photographs taken on a trip to Shackleford Island, near Beaufort, North Carolina.
“Originally, I went to photograph wild horses,” King said. “It was a perfect day with amazing reflections in the clouds, so I suddenly found myself shooting hundreds of photos with clouds with reflections in the clear, fresh water. It had puddled in the sand in perfect formations.”
Slaughter used a process that combined new and old technology in her photos of a Civil War reenactment at Gettysburg.
“I decided to do something a little different,” Slaughter said. “I made a really big negative, rendered it out digitally and then did an overlay in a darkroom. It’s a weird combination of new technology and then taking a step backwards in time in using an antiquated process.”
Anderson took a scientific approach with her series, which started with a monochromatic image before Anderson digitally colored it in.
“I used a scanning electron microscope,” Anderson said. “They are very small specimens of either insect parts or plant parts that I put into the microscope. Then, I imported the photos into Photoshop and digitally painted the black and white images to get the vivid colors. The images are just a couple of millimeters large in real-life.”
“These three MFA students show how much diversity there is in photography,” said Assistant Professor Andrew Ross. “That’s what I love about their work.”
The pieces will be on display on the third floor in McConnell Library until Nov. 8.