Amie Fanning Photos
An island with a steeple rising from it, floating in a lake surrounded by mist. Wild horses charging through water. And snow on the arch on Wooster Street.
These are just a few of the hundreds of images on display until Feb. 13 at Gateway Community College’s New Alliance Foundation Gallery, located on the first floor of Gateway at George Street.
The photographer is Amie Fanning, who works in Gateway’s publications department and, by the look of things, has both an enviable amount of travel experience and the eye to capture it in vivid colors.
In the notes accompanying “Amie’s Adventures, 2016 – 2018,” Fanning writes that “these photographs capture my passion for travel and seeing different compositions in the ordinary. As often and as far as I have voyaged, the road always leads me back home.” Such notes, sprinkled throughout the exhibit, offer glimpses into Fanning’s life as a photographer and human being.
The trip first starts off for New Hampshire, where Fanning informs us that she has a property. She and her spouse live off the grid there; they are planning to retire there as well. Fanning has a knack for the kind of vibrant, color-rich photography that wouldn’t be out of place in an issue of National Geographic. But she also as an eye for the way nature’s patterns can result in almost abstract images, as in the changing foliage of a mountainside.
Fanning thinks of Aruba as her “October home”; she honeymooned there in 1985 and has “gone back many times over the years.” The problems most photographers have with taking pictures in the Caribbean is that the public imagination already swarms with such images: white sandy beaches, palm trees, colorful fish darting among coral. Yet Fanning finds room for an image that feels real, the sun on the beach juxtaposed with a menacing storm offshore.
Likewise, on successive trips to California and New Mexico to visit family — she quickly but poignantly informs us of the passing of a beloved aunt — Fanning’s eye found formal echoes between a colonnade in the desert and a pier on the coast.
An excursion to Hawaii, the farthest point on her travels, yielded pictures of stunning waterfalls and of lava pouring into the ocean (“bucket list item: checked off,” she informs us). But she also found time for this sunset, which perhaps gives a sense of what one might see more frequently if one lived there.
A trip to southern France found Fanning photographing picturesque farmland, fields of deep purple flowers. But she also took this kinetic image of horses galloping through water, the kind of picture that makes you wonder where Fanning was in relation to the animals when she snapped the photo, and how long she may have had to do it before she had to get out of there.
There are more: a waterfront town in Alaska and glaciers calving there; ice formations that glitter like jewels in, well, Iceland. But Fanning doesn’t put her camera away when she comes home. She lives in Clinton, and “some of my best work,” she says, “is from my own yard.”
Nor does she forget to bring her camera to New Haven. “New Haven is my first answer when asked, ‘where are you from?’” she writes. “My grandparents lived here. I went to college and lived here in the 1980s and I work here at GCC now. I love New Haven.” The images she produces suggest she’s telling the truth, whether it’s dazzling photos of the cherry blossoms in Wooster Square, snow piled on a line of cars, or the brilliant yellow of a townhouse door blazing through a light snowstorm. Fanning treats everything she sees, whether at home or halfway across the world, with equal attention and wonder. The same sharp eye that can make you travel far works just as well when you stay where you are.
“Amie’s Adventures, 2016 – 2018” runs at the New Alliance Foundation Gallery at Gateway Community College through Feb. 13.
Photography at this level, like poetry, makes us see the world differently.
Lovely work.