Obscura Gallery announces our third annual Winter Holiday exhibition, One-of-a-Kind III, a group show of unique photo-based artworks priced under $1,500, and found exclusively at our gallery. This year’s exhibit features ten artists:  Michael Berman, Susan Burnstine, Gordon Coons, Lou Peralta, Sara Silks, Aline Smithson, Eddie Soloway, Lynn Stern, Robert Stivers, and Bryan Whitney.  In addition, we are debuting local Santa Fe jewelry artist, Karin Worden who also creates one-of-a-kind jewelry pieces. The open house takes place on Saturday, November 29, from 1-4pm with many of the artists present.

 In the 21^st Century we are most familiar with photography as a medium enabling multiple prints of the same image.  Yet many of the photographic processes that were used in the 19^th and 20^th Century yielded one-of-a-kind prints.  In some cases, the processes made a singular print for each exposure; in other cases, the treatment of prints during production led to singular images.   Included in this exhibition are gelatin silver prints with contemporary mixed media, photo collage, cyanotypes, hand-applied surface texture to gelatin silver prints, gold leaf and digital prints and other mediums that lend themselves to unique artworks including cedar smoked relief prints and one-of-a-kind jewelry.

VIEW ALL THE WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION HERE.

DOWNLOAD THE FULL PRESS RELEASE HERE.

 

 

The photo-based work of Louviere+Vanessa draws on Southern Gothic traditions. They have developed a style innovatively using mixed media and photography. Their latest work, 'Dust of the Stars', delves into the delicate interplay between earthly life and the cosmos. Each piece is finished with a gilt varnish and homemade bioplastics, infusing the work with a subtle luminosity that is a reminder of the divine spark within all matter, connecting the mundane with the transcendent.

"Our latest series “Dust of the Stars” explores the intrinsic connection between the celestial and the earthly. We have created a unique medium by combining bone and water to form handmade bio plastics, symbolizing the organic and the intangible."

"These images represent what the natural world is made of: bone, water, cartilage, the essence of life and a symbol of fluidity and change. Bone and water then come together again to fuse these images into a state of permanence, something the living world is not afforded." L+V 2025

Louviere + Vanessa (Jeff Louviere and Vanessa Brown) make their home and art in New Orleans. Their work combines the mediums and nuances of film, photography, painting and printmaking. They use Holgas, scanners, 8mm film, destroyed negatives, wax and blood. Since they began showing professionally in 2004, they have been in over 50 exhibits and film festivals in America and abroad. They are included in the collections of the Museum of Art | Houston, the Photomedia Center, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, as well as the film archive for Globians International Film in Potsdam Germany, Microcinema in San Francisco, and the George Eastman House.

In addition to producing their innovative still images, Louviere + Vanessa experiment in moving pictures. They have created the first movie, consisting of 1,900 frames, shot with a plastic Holga camera. Based on that film, they shot the animation sequence for Rosanne Cash’s short film, “Mariners & Musicians”, which had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. They were included in the Australian Photography Biennale.

DOWNLOAD THE FULL PRESS RELEASE HERE. 

VIEW ALL THE WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION HERE.

 

Lynn Stern, the convention-defying, New York-based, American photographer, has pushed the boundaries of photography during her 47-year career.  Her work is intimately tied to the history of the photographic medium through her innovative use of natural light, still life, and large-format cameras and film. Stern’s works in the Obscura Gallery exhibition, Echoes of Light, are luminous examples of her innovation. Using natural light and a scrim between the camera and her still life subjects, she veils her subject matter to create a translucence that fills her images with soft light. As a result, in both the Quickening and Force Field series, Stern highlights only the edges of her objects with a stroke of a shadow on a white background. With this innovative use of light, her images resemble charcoal drawings.  Indeed, a viewer who doesn’t understand that a camera made these images might assume Stern creates her work with pencil and paper.

Lynn Stern, the convention-defying, New York-based, American photographer, has pushed the boundaries of photography during her 47-year career.  Her work is intimately tied to the history of the photographic medium through her innovative use of natural light, still life, and large-format cameras and film. Stern’s works in the Obscura Gallery exhibition, Echoes of Light, are luminous examples of her innovation. Using natural light and a scrim between the camera and her still life subjects, she veils her subject matter to create a translucence that fills her images with soft light. As a result, in both the Quickening and Force Field series, Stern highlights only the edges of her objects with a stroke of a shadow on a white background. With this innovative use of light, her images resemble charcoal drawings.  Indeed, a viewer who doesn’t understand that a camera made these images might assume Stern creates her work with pencil and paper.

Influenced by abstract expressionist painting but working as a lens-based photographer, Stern defies the expectations central to photography by pulling away from the sharp focus, instead blurring, veiling, cropping, partially obscuring, and otherwise de-literalizing what is in front of her lens.

 


Purchase the exhibition catalogue here.

 

“My photographs are not about what they are of…. I believe that photography is a medium of light, not representation. Light is to photography as paint is to painting. I think like a painter in that my concerns are largely formal: my aim is to create tension, plasticity, texture, and, especially, spatial ambiguity in which figure (or abstract form) and ground seem to merge with or emerge from one another. Above all, I want the image to feel alive and filled with energy.” - LS

DOWNLOAD THE FULL PRESS RELEASE HERE

VIEW ALL OF LYNN STERN'S WORKS ON OUR WEBSITE HERE.

 

We're excited to welcome back Obscura Gallery artist Danny Lyon for a book signing of his latest release, JUNK: America in Ruins (Damiani, 2025), on Saturday, June 28, 12:30-2:30pm.

JUNK is a spectacular visual journey through the great forgotten junkyards of the West, where the historic gas-guzzling monsters of the 1950s and ’60s lie wrecked and rusting in the relentless western sun. At first with his Rolleiflex loaded with color negative film, then working with a Fujifilm medium format digital camera, Lyon pictures the cars as if they were remnants of a civilization in ruins. Junk: America in Ruins (Damiani Books, 2025) features images of more than 80 American cars that Lyon discovered in forgotten junkyards on travels through Nebraska, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma.

Lyon is one of the most influential photographers of the last six decades and a key figure of New Journalism, whose immersive and groundbreaking works include The Bikeriders (1968), The Destruction of Lower Manhattan (1969), The Southwestern Portfolio: New Mexico and Mexico (1967-1983) and the memoir This Is My Life I’m Talking About (Damiani Books, 2024). Lyon's Civil Rights archive was acquired by the Duke University in 2024, and his photographic documentary Conversations with the Dead remains “as powerful and relevant as ever” in light of America’s ever expanding system of mass incarceration.