Photo credit: Helen Jones |
Picking apples, making pies, filling hundreds of years
of old barn house with new music, standing on a concrete
slab moving your camera, not your body, navigating through
mazes of corn, delighting in junkyards and piles of
tires, sharing stories, visions of precision, of movement
and soulful architecture, making moments with light,
speculating about nostalgia, marveling over treasured
images at the Farber gallery/barn, are just a few of
the happenings that transpired over Columbus Day Weekend
in West Townshend, Vermont.
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On October 6th and 7th Hall Farm, arts education center in
West Townshend, VT hosted students from Insight and The Point,
a youth photography workshop in the South Bronx of New York
City. The event grew out of a conversation between Hall Farm
director, Scott Browning, and Marlboro College student and Insight
instructor, Rebekah Cantor. The premise of the conversation
as well as the weekend was quite simple. "Wow!" Wouldn't it
be great to bring photographers/young adults/students from Southern
Vermont and New York City together? You know, just to see what
might happen?" "Yep that would be cool... let's do it." And
so it was, a very cool weekend, replete with the first flurries
of the season.
The weekend was filled with talking, putting up pictures to
rap about, cooking lasagna, and harmonizing the musical taste
of the oh so discerning ears of the young arteests. The days
were long and short with thinking and talking about images,
asking and answering questions: "So what do you DO in Vermont?"
While also probing deeper issues of personal responses and losses
in relation to the attacks of September 11th. The rooms in the
refurbished barn house were variably filled with scents of Mexican
hot chocolate, bodies strewn over soft surfaces for quick naps,
break dancing lessons, cozy couches watching the film Baraka,
or old Saturday night live reruns, discussions vascillating
between the merits of public transportation, the roots of racial
discrimination in the Crown Heights riots, to the many different
practices of Islam, to how unbelievably hip da music is.
The weekend was one of sharing. Something about this expansive
sharing; of humor, walks in the surrounding woods, discovery
of old shacks, organic apple trees and green mountains, thoughts,
practices and dreams for image making. SHARING. Something about
this sharing with photographers aged 14 to 43, whose passions
for photography range in focus from commercial fashion photography,
to the hitherto unknown subtleties of the performers at the
"freak shows" in Coney Island, to abandoned shacks in rural
countryside's, to the religious fervor of fans at baseball games.
Something about THIS sharing evoked a sensation of clarity similar
in quality only to what it must feel like to see, and maybe
even understand, a bit of the world through 38 eyes.
-Rebekah Cantor
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