Professor Bangert discusses her photos during the showcase in Wickes. Vanguard Photo l Kyle Will
Shaun Bangert, a professor of art for nearly two decades, spoke at a showcase for her photos, which will now hang around third floor Wickes, on Wednesday, January 16, at 3:30 p.m.
Several colleagues and students attended the event, and Bangert gave a brief lecture about her works. The photos were part of three different series, and they were taken in Las Vegas, the Dominican Republic, Italy, Japan and more.
“What you see here are three different series,” she said. “They’re on-going series that’ve I’ve worked on forever. … I tend to do things sequentially. I think it’s my video brain always thinking about what the next thing is going to be.”
The first series she discussed was Serendipity.
“If any of you have any knowledge of photography, Versailles was a great photographer, and he would wait to a precisive moment so the moment that the image is snapped, sort of that serendipitous moment of time where all the planets align, and something happens before your very eyes,” she said.
Many of her photos were taken with an iPhone, including a photo from Serendipity that she shot in Paris.
“What had caught my eye was the car, the cat and the blue parking meter,” she said. “I was actually there photographing when this gentleman in a blue shirt walked past. He was not in the picture originally.”
Bangert took another photo in the series while hiking in Peru.
“We had just climbed up from the side of the mountain, and there were these two gentlemen laughing at all these tourists as they came up, all out of breath,” she said.
Bangert also discussed her Color series, which consists of about eight photos in total.
“I’m really, really attracted to pops of color, but I’m also very interested in abstraction,” she said. “I love dramatic crops, and coming in close, and tricking the eye into making people want to step in and look a little closer to see what it is that’s actually in the photograph.”
Some of her “most boring but also most traditional photos” were taken in Takashima, where she stayed for four months. These photos are of a sunset.
“I would walk every couple of days to the grocery store, which was kind of a trek, and I would have to cross this bridge every day that I went,” she said. “I just happened to see the last week I was there this incredible sunset. I literally just stood there and photographed the sunset from start to finish because it was so extraordinary. So, this just happens to be one in a series of probably of 70 photographs that was taken of that sunset.”
Bangert lastly discussed the 35,000-foot series, which consists of photos taken from an airplane of landscape below.
“I spent a lot of time in planes, and if you look at my iPhone you can see that I probably have over 10,000 photographs out of a plane window, which is sort of sad and ridiculous at some level,” she said. “Once again, it’s looking at the world from a different perspective, one that most of us, when we’re in a plane, don’t really take time to examine. We’re more worried about where we’re going, how fast we’re going to get there, but I’m always attracted to the visual.”
Bangert was excited to share her photos with her colleagues in Wickes.
I’m a visual being, I love image,” she said. “To me, whether it’s something like floating clouds going by or something as brightly colored as a doorway in Argentina, they all have their beauty. I’m so excited I get to capture that, and I’m glad to be able to share that with you.”
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