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slo county art scene renee besta’s photographic memory By Gordon Fuglie
F
or more than 160 years, camera images have dominated our visual culture as the least expensive and most persuasive means to record, instruct, publicize and give personal and aesthetic pleasure. Photography is everywhere; it has even become its own language in film, TV and electronic advertising. Some fear it will diminish writing and speech. Because of their ubiquity, photographs have been paramount in transforming our ideas about ourselves, our institutions and our relationship to the world. The most popular use of photography is the recording of personal moments and events, with the camera replacing the old parlor bible (with its pages marking births, baptisms, marriages, deaths, etc.) as the portal to our memories of loved ones. In the hands of an artist,
like Nicholas Nixon or Sally Mann, the camera captures families and friends in stages of life’s passages. But people don’t need to be present in a photograph to have a presence. Fine art photographers like Lee Friedlander have composed haunting images of lonely cityscapes, domestic interiors, and silenced factories that fairly shout a human presence, even though no people are seen. It is such imagery of human absence-yet-presence that has become a passion for artist Renée Besta of Paso Robles. This sensibility can be seen in her recent work that is enhanced by her mastery of digital high dynamic range photography, a technological advance that allows photographers to combine an unprecedented range of light settings, textures and exposures. Besta originally studied biochemistry but retained an interest in fine art photography while she worked in the corporate world. She arrived in Southern California from St. Louis in 1977, and moved to SLO County in 2003 to take care of her ailing stepparents. Once here, Besta also enrolled at Cuesta College, studying photography under Patty Arnold (SLO Journal, June, 2013). I first met Besta in 2008 while I was the curator at the San Luis Obispo Art Center. She was active in the Central Coast Photographic Society as well as the Camera Club. She also was chafing at the bit to move beyond the conventional pictorial sensibilities and film-based technologies that preoccupied many in these groups. The technologically attuned Besta was eager to explore the expanding digital world with its sophisticated software and richly tonal ink jet printing. Her choice was HDRI (high dynamic range imaging, or HDR), once the well-kept secret of Hollywood’s visual effects community. An early adapter, Besta was quick to see that HDR resolved the age-old film dilemma of whether to expose one’s film for the highlights or shadows, in other words, sacrificing one to obtain the other. HDR eliminated this quandary, allowing photographers to capture the fullest range of luminosity in a scene, despite great differences in tone and contrast. From areas lit in bright sun to the darkest interiors, HDR captures everything in the highest clarity in a single image. Gorged with once unattainable tonal information, the result is a stunningly atmospheric print, a vision of surreality.
A Tall Order N O V E M B E R
2013
Journal PLUS
Besta’s predilection for shooting abandoned and decaying buildings makes HDR her ideal technology for investing her subjects with an