Annual Show 2017
May 1 - June 30, 2017
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Guest Artist
Derrick Trotman
aka TruSoul
Performance: 'Wordology'
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Instagram:TruSoulmovement
Facebook/Twitter:TruSoulmovement
INFocus Camera Club of Boston
INFocus Events
Exhibitions
INFocus Annual Show
June 19 - August 19, 2019
Photo by Kay Mathew
Mission Hill:
Presence, absence and transformation
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Opening reception:
June 28, Friday, 2019
7pm - 9pm
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Exhibition and Opening Reception will be in two different locations
Gallery Location #1
Solid Ground Cafe
742 Huntington Ave. (Brigham Circle)
Mission Hill MA 02115
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Featured INFocus Members:
DAN VLAHOS
DRAGAN GRUJIC
KAY MATHEW
Gallery Location #2
JP Licks - One Brigham Circle
1618 Tremont St.
Mission Hill MA 02120
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Featured INFocus Members:
CHRISTOPHER LOVETT
DOINA ILIESCU
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Presented by COFFEE HOUR SERIES (CHS)
Art Program
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Program Director: Dragan Grujic
e-mail: infocuscameraclubofboston@gmail.com
CHS Gallery website: www.chsgallery.com
INFocus website: www.infocuscameraclub.com
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Sponsored by INFocus Camera Club with funding provided by the Mission Hill Fenway Neighborhood Trust. Special thanks to Mission Hill Main Streets.
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Zachary Durant
INFocus member
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August 19 - October 19, 2019
Stillness in the Breath
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We are accustomed to highly stimulating environments with a multitude of sensory data encompassing our waking consciousness. Here we are, amidst this great flood; powerful currents push and pull us every which way. A feint recollection of the breath without constraint arises. Thus I drive North, where the air rejuvenates the mind and nourishes the heart. There's a different kind of sound all around; the rushing rivers, fluttering leaves, creatures abound. Harmonic stillness melodic in tune, alas freedom from speculation.
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Opening Reception:
August 23, Friday, 2019
7pm - 9pm
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Gallery Location:
JP Licks - One Brigham Circle
1618 Tremont St.
Mission Hill MA 02120
Workshops
MAGIC OF LENSES
Fran Osborn-Blaschke, instructor
Why we need to know camera lenses and how we should use them?
For an example, zoom lenses are versatile, they allow changes in focal length. A change in focal length alters the angle of view. With every change in angle of view your perception of a scene changes too.
The workshop will cover zoom lenses and fixed focal length lenses as well. Questions to be answered:
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- What really happens when you "zoom-in" or "zoom-out"?
- What is the Focal-Length of a particular lens and how it is determined?
- What are the effects of using Telephoto, Normal and Wide-Angle lenses?
- Why we use different focusing modes (e.g. One Shot mode, Automatic Autofocus mode, Manual mode etc.)?
FREE three-hour hands-on workshop. Limited to 7 attendees.
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When:
May 18, 2019
Saturday, 10a -1p
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Where:
Museum of Fine Arts (MFA)
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We will meet at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA). No need for a tripod.
Actual meeting spot TBD.
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Contact:
Dragan Grujic, program director
e-mail: infocuscameraclubofboston@gmail.com
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Essential Photography Skills Series
Free, three-hour workshops. Space limited to 7 participants.
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Our goal is to provide a solid foundation for everyone who is interested in photography. Our workshop presentations cover a wide range of topics and offer a hands-on experience whenever possible. We hope these workshops provide participants with a chance to learn new skills and meet new friends.​
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Workshops are sponsored by INFocus Camera Club with funding provided by the Mission Hill Fenway Neighborhood Trust.
Photo Gallery
INFocus Workshop 2019
INFocus Workshop 2019
INFocus Workshop 2019
INFocus Workshop 2019
INFocus Workshop 2019
INFocus Workshop 2019
INFocus Workshop 2019
INFocus Workshop 2019
INFocus Talks
INTalks are informal, informative discussions with experienced photographers. INTalks are not lectures, they are more about creative minds behind the camera and their art of photography, her/his career and photographic experience. Audience is encouraged to ask questions and actively participate in the discussion.
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Events are free for members and nonmembers.
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Mission Hill
Mission Hill:
Presence, Absence and Transformation
To see Mission Hill is to look beyond the surface, to overlays of space and time, sign and signified, presence and absence.
Likewise, members of the INFocus Camera Club also have different connections to Mission Hill. Some of us are occasional visitors seeing the neighborhood with fresh eyes. Others are past residents, or current residents who’ve been living in the neighborhood for a long time. All of us apply ourselves to the craft of photography, engaged by the neighborhood, especially by whatever triggers the act of looking more closely.
In photographs taken over the past six years, club members see in what’s plainly visible, but also something else, whether it reflects Mission Hill or resonates with another place or time. To stop and look at numbers on houses and names on front doors is to see a story of neighborhood transition, in which the present—or at least the more recent—stands out as a makeshift improvisation. For the photographer, the connection is objective, but also subjective.
At Diablo Glass School, the eye is drawn to base materials and tools, but also to the fluid incandescence of one thing becoming something else, even how it flows from the grip of the arm and hand of the artist. The byproducts are more refined, like the school itself, converted from a plant that once made machine parts.
In other transformations, chairs are exiled to stand guard over a parking space. Even when people are not visible, they are implied—or implicated. A space outside the Tobin School can look deserted, but it is also populated by the faces of students in a mural--an image that, over time, can fade or be outgrown.
To see can also mean to observe what’s not usually noticed. Trees flower every spring in McLaughlin Park, at the top of the hill, but they’re rarely encountered in the dead of night in a deserted playground. With its uncanny play of intense light and darkness, what’s visible here draws attention to what is not, upending the normal distinctions between day and night or time of the year, even between the ominous and the serene.
Under snow, the particular of Mission Hill merges with the universal. As its dimensions and boundaries dissolve, a man walking along Tremont street stops to bow and pray outside the Mission Church. Clutching his jacket against the wind and the faint patter of snowfall, he is turned toward the puddingstone, toward what is present and absent, visible and not.
Chris Lovett
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History of Mission Hill, Boston
Once part of the Town of Roxbury, Mission Hill is a former “streetcar suburb,” an extension of city and countryside, if only in microcosms of land or features of design. The present-day urban neighborhood is tightly packed with multi-story buildings, often divided by chain-link fences, defended by wrought-iron, or signed with graffiti. Whether it is a long-term home with the feel of a community, or a transitional adjunct to higher education, the residential is never all that far from the industrial or the institutional, the personal from the impersonal, the material from the aspiration.
True to its name, Mission Hill is very much defined by topography. Streets slope, curve and slant with the land mass, or come to an abrupt stop. Starting from the late 1800s, the proliferation of brick rowhouses and three-deckers made it possible for more people to live near public transit or jobs, including those at breweries near Stony Brook in Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. On a similar scale was the Romanesque Revival Mission Church, serving German and Irish immigrants, and built with material from the neighborhood, Roxbury puddingstone.
By the mid-20th century, Mission Hill would become home for African-American, Latino and Asian residents, just as the area was increasingly sought after for institutional expansion or base for students.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the diverse population includes long-term residents, people in transition, or people who identify with the neighborhood because they lived there in the past.
What remains the same is the feel of a separate place, whether in tight quarters at close range or panoramic distance from the rest of the city.
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Photo by C. Lovett
Interview with
the Master
Lesley University’s Strauch-Mosse Lecture Series
Sebastião Salgado
April 25, 2013
Boston Public Library​​
Preeminent contemporary photographer Sebastião Salgado is known for his expansive projects that strive to inform—and transform—the viewer. A photojournalist and documentary photographer, Salgado depicts the working poor in developing nations, providing a stunning humanist commentary on broad sociopolitical and economic themes. His socially-concerned work serves to increase awareness of the realities of the waning industrial age.​
Photo: D.Grujic
Q: How did you start photographing?​​
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I was born at a farm, near the town Aimorés, state Minas Gerais. Nature was so beautiful there. As a child I was free to wonder around, all day long. That was my paradise. I think, all my images come from that place, where the light is so beautiful, bright and powerful.

As a young man I moved to Sao Paolo to study economy. At the university I have become interested in social injustice and became politically active. Military junta ruled Brazil during the sixties and seventies, and as a political activist I faced a dilemma: to stay in the country and become radical militant, or to leave. After getting masters degree in economics I decided to leave Brazil with my wife Lelia and to move to France.
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My wife studded architecture in ​Paris and in one occasion she gave me a photo camera to take pictures for her project. That was the first time I got an opportunity to see the world through the camera's eye. After short period of time I was more exited with taking pictures than being in the office working as an economist for the World Bank, and in 1973 I decided to become a photographer.

In the beginning I have tried to shoot everything and anything, from sports, landscape, to social events, but I was lost - I didn't know why I was taking pictures. Later on I found myself in documentary photography and photography has become my life.
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I always shoot "body of work", basically photo essays in today's terms. It is always one theme, on which I work for years. Some people try to categorize my approach to photography as photo journalism, anthropological photography, social photography etc. No, photography is my life and it is a vessel to express myself and my leftist believes. I do it with all my sincerity and with respect towards those photographed, by understanding them and living with them.

My first body of work was "Other Americas". As a leftist and being very close to working class, my next two books were about workers around the world. Those two books were "Workers" and "Migrations". The recent body of work is "Genesis".

​Q: How do you gain a trust of people who you photograph?
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As an "Ambassador of Good Will", and working with organization "Doctors without Borders" I was able to become very close friend with people who I photographed. I lived with them, I empathized with them, I even helped the doctors to cure them. Their life was my life.
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People have dignity and you can't just approach one person and take pictures. You are right, photographer has to earn somebody's trust to be able to get closer and take pictures. You see, I don't abuse somebody's trust, if I see a person is uncomfortable in front of the camera, I don't take pictures.

​Q: Is it effortless for you to get yourself in a situation of taking pictures?​

It looks like that, isn't it? I identify myself with the situation and I become part of that moment in time. Sometimes I don't feel that I am a part of something and I let it go. For me, taking pictures is like living life, sometimes it's easy, but sometimes it is not.
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​Q: In your photographs sometimes we can see the absence of hope for all those hard working people. What is it what gives you hope to continue to do what you do?

I am always amazed how human beings are capable of transforming our planet into something different and beautiful. That is a good side of us, we build and create.

There is another side of human being. All these gold miners in Minas Gerais can't get much from their hard work, but big banks and merchants of gold become richer and richer, every day.These discrepancies produce crises and then we can see big tragedies happen: poverty, wars, hunger etc.

Photographer has a privilege to see all these events as an insider. Sometimes you are fed up, and you can't help yourself not to think that we are animals.
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I am not happy to see these things. With my photography I am trying to raise the level of awareness, hoping that someone will make an effort to change the world in a positive sense.

​Q: Working on your projects, how many times in your career you have been in confrontation with authorities?​

Not many times. I always carried with me a small Leica camera which gave me an opportunity to be very mobile, but not suspicious to authorities. Anyhow, when you do this kind of a job you learn to adapt and deal with many unusual situations.

​Q: Do these experiences - seeing so much death and tragedies - led you to "Genesis", this time seeing life as a potent force?
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In the beginning of this conversation I mentioned my village, where I lived freely, like in a paradise. You see, when I was there last time only one half of a percentage of the rain forest left. I was so sad. The whole idea of "Genesis" is about how to save our planet from further destruction. I believe we as a human kind can do that.
