The Somerville Toy Camera Festival is back for another year starting Saturday, a multigallery exhibit embracing the sense of experimentation, joy and imperfection that come with cheap camera equipment.
The fest welcomes submissions largely from film cameras, with plastic lenses or no lens at all. These devices give the artist very little control over the exposure, or the amount of light coming into the camera. With those technical limitations come thrilling challenges and surprisingly great results.
This year’s selections are impressive and poetic, especially given the humble tools they were made with. Lori Walsh Van Wey’s photographs, “Home” and “The Sleeper,” resemble Sally Mann’s pensive pictures of the American South, which were understated yet haunting. Though they’re simple black-and-white images of a fallen statue and a house carpeted with vines, there’s that same sense of dilapidation and loneliness.
There’s also lots of great double exposures, in which one picture often floats on top of another. Bilha Salomon’s images are ghostly. In a Salomon self-portrait, her face appears distraught. Fading in on the first image’s arm is another face looking down. The entire photo has a dark ring around it, as if the viewer is looking at it through a telescope. In Jonathan Pinto’s “Ancestral Magic,” a dark and ghostly hand reaches toward some shadowy images of trees, the hand surrounded by a bright pink circle. A lighthouse image by Marna Waskin appears as if out of fog.
Having operated for more than a decade, festival submissions now come in internationally. Photos were judged this year by Mary Kocol, a Somerville photographer and former Guggenheim Fellowship recipient.
The photos pack a punch, many bordering on sad or surreal. As Kocol writes in a reflection on her selections: “Many of these images remind me of the close looking we did during Covid time, the appreciation of everyday moments, seeing beyond the ordinary.”
Somerville Toy Camera Festival Saturday through Sept. 27 at the The Nave Gallery, 155 Powderhouse Blvd., near Teele Square, and Washington Street Art Center, 321 Washington St., Ward 2. Free.
Share your own 150-word appreciation for a piece of visual art or art happening with photo to editor@cambridgeday.com with the subject line “Behold.”
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