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RYAN HULVAT LOVES TO photograph his mother-in-law’s dahlia field, an acre and a half of shaggy starbursts on a slaggy family farm in rural Bethlehem. His photos honor the good will of Shirline Moser, who donates proceeds from bulbs, cuttings and arrangements to her church’s food bank. For Hulvat, a professional photographer whose subjects include fashionable food and urban gardens, Moser’s flower patch brims with the beauty of charity. Hulvat’s portraits of his mother-in-law’s charitable dahlias will be displayed November. 4-27 at Home & Planet, a Bethlehem store that sells hip, ethical recycled goods. The show is part of a new photo extravaganza involving a whopping 41 venues this month in and around Bethlehem, Allentown and Easton. Lehigh Valley Photography Month doubles as a satellite for the first-year InVision Photo Festival, a November 3-6 Bethlehem feast of exhibits, lectures, workshops, competitions and portfolio reviews run by ArtsQuest, the non-profit parent of Musikfest. Visitors can see Andy Warhol’s Polaroids of celebrities, hear Michael Soluri discuss his documentation of NASA’s last space-shuttle mission, and shoot industrial night pictures in Bethlehem Steel’s former electrical repair shop. This big-picture event was organized by a big-picture person. Janice Lipzin directs visual arts and education at the Banana Factory, ArtsQuest’s community cultural center and one of InVision’s two locations. Over eight years she’s launched a digital photo teaching center, job-training photography classes for disadvantaged youngsters and a partnership between trained artists and cancer patients. A photographer, a former director of the Magnum photo agency and a breast-cancer survivor, she created InVision to spotlight photography’s unique ability to inform, inspire and incite. Lipzin also created InVision to unite the Valley’s historically divided communities, to make a disjointed region a little more jointed. She and her committee members linked an exceedingly wide range of subjects, styles and sites—lantern slides at an Easton museum, gender-bending self-portraits at a Bethlehem salon, pictures of a conductorless chamber orchestra at Symphony Hall in Allentown—in the hope that Allentonians will visit places other than the State Theatre in Easton and Eastonians and Allentonians will visit Bethlehem outside of Musikfest. Lipzin’s other mission is to showcase Pennsylvania as a hub for exceptional photographers. One of her key keystoners is InVision resident artist Mark Cohen, who for five decades has turned the streets of his native Wilkes-Barre into guerrilla theater. Armed with a wide-angle lens, a strobe and a hit-and-run attitude, he cuts off heads, skews legs and forces people to raise arms against his invasions of privacy. He’s a crazy choreographer and a sneaky sociologist who haunts the intersection of chance and circumstance, flux and fear. Cohen has a sweet side, too. His solo show at the Banana Factory includes a portrait of two kids under a cardboard box, a lovely view of childhood’s eternal Halloween. One of his best-known subjects, a youngster blowing a giant gum bubble, is one of the imThis page top: Eye Makeup. Judy Linn image of Patti Smith from “Patti Smith 1969-1976” This page bottom: Megan, Michael Soluri.
Geoff Gehman covered Walker Evans, Herman Leonard and other Lehigh Valley photographers as an arts writer for The Morning Call in Allentown, Pa. He is the author of three books, including The Kingdom of the Kid, a memoir of growing up in the middle-class, long-lost Hamptons. He can be reached at geoffgehman@verizon.net. 30
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NOVEMBER 2011