Conjure
Lexington Camera Club

September 1 - October 13   ​Comprised of 130+ photographs by 34 photographers, young and old, film and digital, amateur and professional, who share the conviction that anytime you trip the shutter you trip the light fantastic, summoning up a practical magic with sleight of hand and eye. Manifested visions transform light/place/person/animal/thing into two-dimensional talismans to consecrate the natural world and its inhabitants.

Special guest artists: Community Inspired Lexington students, longtime National Geographic photographer Sam Abell, and Bill Roughen, who created and taught the first art photography classes at UK in the late 1960s.

Opening reception Friday, September 1st, 5-9pm

Participating Artists

Bill Cole
To me, CONJURE evokes the creation of something new, something mysterious and possibly never known before. While moving through several careers in education and business I learned that life is fluid and cannot exist in some mythical state of normality. New ways of doing and being are constantly brought to us and forced into our paths. 

These images are all designed to explore music in a new way. My journey into macro photography led me to explore the view of musical instruments and imagery with an amazing piece of equipment, a probe lens, which allows a unique view of the world. Spoon Tunes follows music as it reflects on common items. The Parting of the ”C” looks at the sharp detail of the middle C key, the heart of a piano, and Yakkety Sax looks at music from the inside of a saxophone. 

Bill Cole is a resident of Lexington KY and has been photographing the world around him since 1970. ​

Bill Roughen

To conjure brings to mind the idea of creating something from nothing. It's like the experience I used have when an image would magically appear in the developing tray. Now I conjure with mysterious bits of magnetism that somehow turn into pixels of colored light, which miraculously turn into images. In Zen calligraphy, a circular form is drawn to express the completeness or the emptiness of the present moment. The series of images presented here explores the simplicity of the circle using nothing but light and shadow to create… something from nothing.

Bill Roughen, a professional photographer, sometimes painter, and peripatetic dog walker, lives and works in Lexington with Teresa and Suzie (dog). ​

Carey Neal Gough

“With my hair almost on end and the eyes of the soul wide open I am present, without knowing it at all, in this unspeakable Paradise, and I behold this secret, this wide open secret which is there for everyone, free, and no one pays any attention” THOMAS MERTON 

Paying attention to the way the light falls on a tangle of vines or the sound of two rivers meeting, or even the pace of my own thoughts as I wander down an unfamiliar trail has helped me better recognize the wide open secret that Merton described in “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.” The images here were taken on an island in the Tuckasegee River in North Carolina on a day where the secret was doing a particularly bad job of hiding. 

Carey Gough's images are often contemplations on the point in which documentary photography mingles with poetry, cultural memory, and mythology. She is often drawn to spaces with musical connections. Her work has been exhibited in both the United States and the United Kingdom, including the Hereford Photography Festival, Cincinnati FotoFOCUS Biennial, and Institute 193 in Lexington, KY. She has been featured on vice.com, noisey.com, the Oxford American’s Eyes on the South, and RawFile. She received a BA First Class Honours in Photography from Hereford College of Arts and an MFA in Documentary Photography from the University of Wales, Newport. Carey lives in Lexington, KY.

David Coyle

To conjure is not the act of producing the photograph, but of instilling into the viewer the same emotions and thoughts that motivated the person behind the camera. If done honestly the image will bring exhilaration, curiosity and wonder, as if by magic. David Coyle, a Lexington native now in his fifth decade as a professional photographer and conjurer.

David Fitts 

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what’s an artist’s statement worth? I photograph what catches my eye. Sometimes it works. More often, it doesn’t. If the beholder eyes it up and likes it, then I am pleased. I have won awards for architectural photography and have had photographs in numerous exhibits, including Joshua Tree National Park's 75th Anniversary Exhibit. I have worked as a professional photographer since 1980

Dobree Adams

These three images, adorned with green beads, were captured in New Orleans, the city of voodoo, on Saint Patrick’s Day. MASKED and LOVED ONES were conjured among the architecturally fascinating above-ground tombs in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 on Basin Street. This first New Orleans cemetery, established in 1789, is close to the heart of the city. Buried there are many historical figures including the renowned Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveau.

Dobree Adams, raised in Lexington, lives on a Kentucky River farm in the flood plain north of Frankfort. She has been long recognized in the region as a fiber artist. She began using the camera as a tool to capture and share the influences behind her woven work. That morphed into showing her photographs with her tapestries and then into solo and group exhibitions of her photography starting with the 2013 Louisville Photo Biennial.

Ed Lawrence

In 2022, after completing several major projects, I put the camera down. Having not lost the impulse to photograph I used my iPhone to capture the beauty of my garden. These digital photo collages conjure a world in which all the flowers in my garden of a specific color bloom at the same time. This is a new exploration for me.

Ed Lawrence has explored many visual art media including painting, sculpture and surface design—always returning to photography for artistic expression. He is the author and designer of the book “Kentucky 120,” a collection of landscape photographs from each of Kentucky’s counties. His most recent large body of work, “Woods and Waters” was showcased in a solo exhibit and catalog, featuring photographs made over a five-year period on private lands in the lower Kentucky River watershed, protected by the Woods and Waters Land Trust.

Evelyn Astrid Knight

The camera can see clearly and literally, but it can also tease our perception—our “vision.” Even an apparently representational image may spark reflection or raise personal or social questions. I wonder whether images that are unclear, even unfocused, may inspire contemplation that takes the viewer out of themselves to consider other dimensions.  

The Enchanted Meadow Series, which includes the images shown in CONJURE, brings the soft, dreamy style I had previously pursued into partnership with the multi-colored glory and excitement of the flower world. This is an exploration into a liminal space where color and contrast point to what lies within the image and beyond it, integrating the worlds of representation and ambiguous blur. There is no question these are flowers, but perhaps they are not just everyday flowers we might forget to stop and enjoy. They live on the enchanted banks of Clear Creek in Rockcastle County, Ky. and emerge each year with the returning sun of spring and summer to be present to Beauty and Joy.  As you view each image, I invite you to consider what you think you see—or what you think these flowers see.

For several years Evelyn Astrid Knight has been interested in how images might conjure a sense of mystical and spiritual realities, starting with an exploration of sacred spaces in 2016. Recently she turned her camera toward our spiritual connection with nature, specifically flowers. She has been an active photographer for over 35 years and in retirement has been exploring images and the photographic process in new ways. Evelyn retired from the University of Kentucky and continues to live in Lexington. In 2020 Evelyn was certified as a Forest Therapy Guide. It is her hope that her work will invite contemplative viewing and encourage meaningful reflection.

Gary Hansen

There are fleeting moments when light and shadow and object combine in an almost magical way. When they do, it’s as if emotions, past experiences, words, people, songs and any number of other significant things that define our lives and create meaning are being “conjured up.” It can happen anywhere, whether in the familiar surroundings of our home or in the most unfamiliar and exotic of locations. My images in the exhibit were selected to represent such moments.

After a lifetime interest in photography, I began pursuing my own work more seriously after retiring from the University of Kentucky and a career in sociology. As a sociologist with a camera, I consider myself a photo-sociologist who uses photography to document the unique settings in which we live, interact and collectively create meaning. As such, my images, even when people are absent, reflect human experiences within both social and natural environments.

Graham Fielder

I’ve spent several years traveling with musicians and documenting tours professionally. I now design and build camper vans in Oregon. These photos were taken during my move out west when the light struck right, and I had just had to pull off onto the side of the road to capture that feeling. [email protected] www.grahamfielder.com

Greg Reynolds

Reynolds’s long-term photographic portrait project Possibly Maybe (1989 –2023) documents male youth and beauty from the point of view of a gay Southerner, a former evangelical youth minister, and a student of cinema. After spending most of his twenties working for a conservative Christian evangelical student organization in Kentucky, Reynolds came out as a gay man and moved to New York City. He pursued portrait photography while working as a cater waiter and office temporary to survive. His first subjects were other waiters (including actors, dancers, and models), boyfriends, and strangers he met in bars and clubs. His camera allowed him to look at these men and channel his sexual feelings in a way that his religious life never permitted. His subjects reflect the artist's presence by allowing and returning his gaze. However, Possibly Maybe is about more than merely sexual desire. These images reveal Reynolds’s closeness to his subjects; his conviction that a portrait is, as far as possible, an act of love; and the fact that only through finding the true beauty in a model can a meaningful picture be made. 

Greg Reynolds (born in 1952 in Lexington, Kentucky) is a photographic artist currently based in Lexington, Kentucky, who works in analog film. His portraiture and visual storytelling reflect his rich and varied history of experience. In 1983, at age thirty, Reynolds resigned from the conservative Christian evangelical student organization he worked for, came out as a gay man, and moved to New York City to attend the MFA Program in Film at Columbia University. Over the next thirty plus years, he photographed family, friends, boyfriends, and strangers. His camera gave him license to look at other men and capture the intimacy they shared through the lens.

Guy Mendes

CONJURE! What does that mean? It means we’re making this shit up. We have looked, we have seen, and now we’re conjuring up a little “slight of hand,” or “legerdemain.” We are bringing images to the “mind’s eye.” We are conspiring to practice magic. I’m hoping my photographs have a little bit of something-like-you-ain’t-never-seen, a soupçon of je ne sais quoi, and a smidgeon of whatthefuckisthat. My pictures range from a strangely comic horseman-of-the-apocalypse in downtown Lexington, to the skull of a unicorn (not really) found on Marble Creek, to a kind of goofy relic from the prairie past in a small midwestern town, to a ready-made conjuring of supplicant’s hand pointing toward heaven on Easter Day, and finally to a summoning up of a lost loved one on a lake in Iowa.

​Shazam!

Guy Mendes has been photographing seriously, and sometimes not so seriously, for over 50 years. His most recent exhibit was a portrait show called COHORTS at the University of Kentucky Art Museum in 2022. His most recent book is Walks to the Paradise Garden—A Lowdown Southern Odyssey, published in 2018 by the Institute 193 in Lexington and Atlanta’s High Museum. 

John Lynner Peterson

A photograph is a frame I selected at a moment in time and place. Looking becomes seeing, translated through my lens. I use my camera as a ticket to explore the world and provide a visual interpretation of what I see. I enjoy sharing the experience. Faces of people in their full range of expression remain deeply fascinating subjects.

John Lynner Peterson is a professional photographer based in Lexington, KY. He is a native of Clarkfield, MN where he learned from his father the fascinating perspective on life that photography provides. Following graduation from St. Olaf College, John traveled the globe with an extended stop in Papua New Guinea. He returned to the US via South Asia and bus from Kathmandu to London ending in a flight to Iowa. Following graduate degrees from Wartburg Theological Seminary and The University of Texas at Austin, John began his career as a founder and initial hire in several positions in television, radio and communication consulting. He has now returned to his roots in multiple genres of photography. John is delighted to be married to Brenda Bartella Peterson.

Kevin Nance

A lot of my photos have a magical realist quality, a sense that something supernatural or uncanny is happening. When I hear the word conjure, which is the title of this show, I get a whiff of that magic, which piques my interest in the slightly warped world we glimpse in reflections and other "sideways" looks at the world.

​Kevin Nance is a photographer and writer in Lexington. His photographs have been exhibited in Chicago and Lexington, including in "Dreamscapes," his recent solo show at the Lexington Art League. You can see more of his photography at kevinnance.tumblr.com.

Libby Falk Jones

Dunes are ever-changing, especially at dawn—a source of contemplation, mystery, and wonder.  In the Mesquite Dunes in Death Valley National Park in spring 2022, I explored permutations of beauty in line, texture, and shading.

Professor Emerita of English at Berea College, Libby Falk Jones has studied, taught, practiced, and written about contemplative writing and photography for more than a decade.  A featured Artist in the Library in Berea, she is a juried member of the Kentucky Guild of Artists and Craftsmen and was a member of Kentucky Women Photographers Network.  Recent exhibit sites include the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center at Berea College (solo show including over 100 photographs), the WUKY gallery in Lexington, Berea Arts Council, and Baton Rouge General Hospital.  Her photographs are part of permanent collections at several regional hospitals.

Liz Hansen

My images in this exhibit document discarded dolls and mannequins found in antique, vintage and thrift stores for which dealers have conjured new identities or purposes and placed them in conversation with other objects. The resulting talismans leave the viewer to ponder the histories and stories of the human representations while also contemplating the conjurer’s intention and message.

My approach to photography is journalistic. My images tell stories by depicting people, places, objects and events as I encounter them. Although photography was part of my journalism education, during my career as a newspaper reporter, freelance writer and journalism professor, my photos usually complemented my writing and rarely stood alone. After retiring from Eastern Kentucky University, I became a writing coach for the photojournalism section of Western Kentucky University’s Mountain Workshops, which renewed my interest in creating stand-alone images.

Madeline Cronen

Madeline Cronen is a visual artist from Lexington who now attends the University of Cincinnati for Communication Design. She has been taking photographs for most of her life and loves to capture the emotion and beauty of her community in her work.

Maja Willow Linden

The spirit world remains ethereal, intangible, elusive, and yet the feeling is there, deep within our bones. For millennia, we have sought this primal connection to spirit, being guided intuitively to create art of that which is invisible to the eye. After years of hobbyistic study of Slavic spirituality, I spent six months in Europe diving deep into my ancestors’ myths and legends, specifically those of Marzanna, the winter goddess of death, rebirth, and dreams. I sensed Her whispering to me, yearning to be seen and captured while She shaped a tapestry of desires into an entangled web of dreams. She murmured… come find me in the dark, weaving shadows into ecstatic bliss. 

Maja Willow Linden is a first generation Polish-German American. She studied art studio at the University of Kentucky before pursuing a career in nature, adventure, and creative portrait photography. Maja is frequently found traveling the world with at least one camera hanging off her neck, seeking and ready to preserve the essence of a moment’s emotional integrity.

Marcia Lamont Hopkins

What has always interested me is what lies beneath the surface appearance of things. Observing a tree, I wonder what is the sacred geometry of its design, what mystery gives it life? My studies of Nature become dreamscapes which extend out notions of the world around us. 

Marcia Lamont Hopkins holds a BFA in Film And Fine Art and a PhD in Psychology

Maryjean Wall

The conjuring light forms shadows into shapes that might be horses -- or might not. How should we discern these shapes obscured in the half-light separating what is real from what is not? The shapes stand rooted in the folds of morning mists that rise on the ebb tide of darkness. What follows next is the big reveal about the light's sleight of hand: horses! They are moving slowly into view, their nostrils whiffling with air drawn in, air blown out, testing the textures of the new day's scents. We press the shutter release. 

Maryjean Wall is an author and journalist whose life cannot be defined separately from horses. She holds a Ph.D. in U. S. History from the University of Kentucky, attended French studies at Laval University in Quebec City, and holds certificates in music from the University of Toronto and the University of Western Ontario in London. Sometimes, she photographs.

Melissa Watt

What I like most about photography is the magic. The light, the moment and the movement all reflect that magic. Luck can be the sleight of hand. Abracadabra 

Melissa has participated with The Lexington Camera Club since 2014. Her work has been exhibited in the Camera Club’s biennial exhibits as well as at Institute 193, The Headley Whitney Museum, and M.S. Rezney’s 3x33, among others.

Mick Jeffries

Photography is always with me. Even before everybody had a camera in their pocket, I usually had one around my neck. It's my solace and sometimes my demon, as I feel the world slipping by, and the regular, familiar compulsion to stop for … a moment. I'm trained as a photojournalist and my joy comes from making meaningful photos of friends and family, living their best lives. Sometimes after they've completed those lives. Eventually that will be true for all my photos. I don't know what happens then. So I try to pay attention to the Now.

Ruth Adams

Per Noi: Conversations with the Ancestors is a response to the recent increase in anger, bigotry, and divisiveness across the US. This work looks to the past to find reassurance that we will survive this blip, once again find balance, and come together as humans instead of adversaries. Be it the stones that are left at grave sites to say, “I was here, I remember”, or the chairs set up to invite a visit and conversation, these images invite communication, intervention, questions, and connection. They remind us to take guidance from the wisdom and the energy of the ages. 

Ruth Adams is a nationally recognized artist, a Professor of Photography, and the Director of the School of Art and Visual Studies at the University of Kentucky. Adams’ photography deals with issues of mindfulness, intimacy, ancestry, mortality and renewal. She has exhibited internationally, won numerous awards and grants, and her photographs hang in numerous private and public collections. Adams holds an MFA in Photography and Digital Art from the University of Miami, a BFA in Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology, and a BS in Computer Science from Syracuse University. An experienced photographer, digital/analog hybrid artist, and educator, Adams has developed a reputation as a dynamic instructor and an innovative artist and enjoys introducing students to the ever-changing world of analog and digital photography. You can reach her at RuthAdamsPhotography.com or [email protected] 

Sam Abell

I learned photography from my father, a teacher, at our home in Sylvania, Ohio. After graduating from the University of Kentucky I worked for National Geographic as a contract and staff photographer for thirty-three years. In 1990, my work was the subject of a one-person exhibition and monograph titled Stay This Moment at the International Center of Photography in New York City. Since then I have published four additional collections of work: Seeing Gardens; Sam Abell: The Photographic Life; The Life of a Photograph and Sam Abell Library. In addition, I maintain a career as a writer, teacher, and lecturer on photography.

Shaena Neal

I see these photographs as collected fragments, representing the (dis)connections between the natural and artificial within our daily lives. We find ourselves captured in the fringes. As we witness gradual and sudden changes in our collective landscapes, how do we orient ourselves moving forward? How does our perspective of these liminal spaces affect our sense of place, throughout time and individually – and the ways photography has affected our gaze on the world? Touching Ground exposes symbolic margins where environment and the human touch blur. 

Shaena Neal’s photography focuses on environmental entanglement – framing loss, desire, and memory within the impacts of the shifting climate. She received her BFA from the University of Kentucky in 2016. Now living on a farm in Bourbon County, Kentucky, the landscape near and far inspire Shaena’s photographic reflections. In recent years, her studies and artistic pursuits shift between analog and digital photographic processes; the Touching Ground series is captured on 35mm film and finalized as silver-gelatin prints.

Tom Eblen

Like a Supreme Court justice viewing pornography, I know a good picture when I see one. Maybe it’s the light, the composition, the color or a decisive moment. If I’m lucky, it’s all of those. My photographic interests and experience come out of the tradition of photojournalism and documentary photography. I seek to find photographs, not stage them. My favorite pictures tell something about the human condition in all its glory and absurdity. The same with the built environment. And while I appreciate a beautiful landscape, I’m always looking for the human element. 

Tom Eblen is a writer, editor and photographer. He was metro/state columnist for the Lexington Herald-Leader from 2008 to 2019 and the newspaper’s managing editor from 1998-2008. He now works part-time for the Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning, promoting Kentucky’s literary arts and managing the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. Eblen returned to his hometown in 1998 after 14 years with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he was a regional/national writer and a business reporter and editor. Before that, he worked for The Associated Press in Louisville, Nashville and as correspondent in charge of the Knoxville bureau. He has won many awards, including the 2013 media award in the Kentucky Governor’s Awards in the Arts. He was inducted into the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame in 2016. His photographs have appeared in newspapers across the country, as well as in books and magazines, including Newsweek and Garden & Gun. He has been on the faculty of The Mountain Workshops as a writing coach since 1995.

Walter Foreman

Artist's Statement It seems I now only take pictures within the three-block by eight-block boundary of my own neighborhood. Within even tighter bounds, four of these photographs were made at my home (outside or inside) and the fifth about three blocks away, but they conjure far distant times, places, and realities. 

Bio Walter Foreman was born in Berkeley, California; progressed from K to 12 in Corvallis, Oregon; graduated from Harvard College; acquired a PhD from the University of Washington; and served on the faculty of the University of Kentucky English Department for fifty years, retiring in 2022. He took his first photograph in 1952.