Artist Photo.
“Baby Legs,” digital photograph by Meredith.
“The baby’s strapped to her, the toddler is clinging to her skirt, this is her coffee, her arm so limp it barely holds it — this is motherhood.”
Allan Appel Photo
Photographers Ramin, Meredith, and Bush, with anonymous toddler and oatmeal cookie.
That’s how Phyllis Meredith captioned one of her photographs in “Mother(ing) & Child,” a sweet pop-up exhibition on what it means to be a mom and to mother.
The locale — a perfect cupcake choice — is Katalina’s, the bakery on Whitney Avenue, where Meredith shares the brightly lit and aromatic space with two other photographers, Joy Bush and Cathy Wilson Ramin.
The show, curated by the Arts Council Communications Manager Nichole René, is a complementary exhibition to “Family Reunion: Psyche, Spirit, and Humanness,” an exploration of portraiture and the human face, which is concluding at the Council’s 70 Audubon Street offices just around the corner.
Mother(ing) & Child runs at Katalina’s through May 30.
At the opening reception this past Friday, the artists chatted, kids explored under the tables and chairs of the bakery, Alika Hope and the Ray of Hope Project played soft tunes, and a quarter of the proceeds from the evening’s sales of cakes, cookies, and Katalina’s cupcakes went, as part of Dining Out for Life, to Aids Project New Haven.
“Time to Let Go,” digital print, by Ramin.
All three of the photographers at Katalina’s straddle the world of commercial and fine art photography, and the dozen images in the show are polished, accomplished, relaxed, and intimate at the same time.
The Branford-based Ramin said that one of the keys to her practice, which is 80 percent portraits of parents and kids, is “being patient, spending extra time, becoming a participant in their family. It’s more authentic than telling everyone to smile.”
Meredith says she’s out to find and photographically capture love in its various emanations — love of humans for each other, love of nature, and love of the varieties of human nature.
A self-described New Yorker now based in West Hartford, Meredith said her commercial and fine art work are all on a kind of flowing continuum. When it comes to capturing images of kids, however, she deploys some secret weapons.
“I’m very short and I sing a lot. Children love me,” she said.
Two of the photographers — Meredith and Bush — showed images taken with old-fashioned film cameras. Meredith, who attests that her origins as a photographer come out of the remembered sights and aromas of her grandfather’s dark room, used a Microcord Twin Lens Reflex camera for some of the images at Katalina’s, which were recently also shown at the New Britain Museum of American Art.
Bush, who was the official university photographer at SCSU from 1983 to 2007, showed images that were taken in the late 1980s when she did a series on pregnant moms, and then followed up with images of the kids when they had emerged.
Artist Photo
Untitled silver print by Bush
“I thought the shapes [of the pregnant women] were absolutely beautiful,” Bush said at the reception. And “when they are pregnant, a lot of women don’t mind being photographed,” she added.
Though she spends as much time in front of a screen as she does in a darkroom, Bush said she liked the the overall greater sense of the tactile she could get with film. “There’s a graininess in the silver prints you don’t get in the digital,” she added.
With its cupcakes, cookies, and open floor plan easy for strollers to maneuver, Katalina’s has always struck this reporter as a place where it’s Mother’s Day every day. And unlike the conditions at many coffee shops and eateries around town that also display art, at Katalina’s, for most of the images you don’t have to stand like a sentry or lean awkwardly over people eating their steaming soup to see the photos properly.
“Mother(ing) & Child” makes a perfect destination for May 8, Mother’s Day, and hey, if you spill something, no problem. That’s what humans do, especially of the mom and kid variety.
