When Sarah Ruiz ’18 came to campus, she was shocked to learn that the College did not have an official photography club. That’s why she created the Grinnell Photography Club, with the goals of forging relationships with other photographers on campus and building a community of like-minded creative individuals. On Wednesday, Dec. 10, in collaboration with Friends of Faulconer, the Grinnell Photography Club opened a pop-up exhibition in the Bucksbaum Rotunda to celebrate its successful first semester.
With the help of third- and fourth-years, the Grinnell Photography Club was able to work closely with Tilly Woodward, Faulconer Gallery Curator of Academic and Community Outreach, to create its first pop-up exhibition. After about three weeks of preparation, half a week of waiting to receive the prints and two days to hang up the prints, the exhibit finally came to fruition.
“Tilly helped us with getting this space,” said Frank Zhu ’15. “She helped us print the labels, too.”
According to Zhu, the main organizer of the pop-up exhibit, the exhibition was not arranged with any particular theme in mind. However, the 18 photographs on display do exhibit a range of tone and color, transitioning from light photographs in the beginning to the darker images at the end of the exhibit.
“We just wanted diverse photographs,” Zhu said.
Zhu also contacted his photographer friends on campus to contribute to the exhibit. One of his friends, Yohei Takatsuka ’15, contributed two images from a collection of photographs he took while in Japan.
“I sent six images,” Takatsuka said. “But they chose two of them. One of the images I took is a portrait of my close friend and the other image was shot randomly of people I don’t really know.”
Three club members sat in on part of the committee that chose the images for the pop-up exhibit, selecting diverse images that they felt showcased the brilliance and talent of the photographers on campus.
“I don’t know why I chose this photograph,” Ruiz said. “The photograph in the exhibit is actually a photo I took last year for a chance project I did in one of my classes.”
The exhibit itself was expensive due to the cost of the prints.
“It’s kind of expensive,” Zhu said. “This was like 200 or 300 bucks because the prints were very expensive and the boards cost a lot.”
Throughout the club’s run this semester, the club members took photographs around a weekly central theme, but this did not become a factor in the theme or the composition of the exhibition.
Although this is the first time the Photography Club created an exhibit, Zhu hopes to make an exhibit a recurring event each semester, featuring a diverse range of photography from a multitude of students on campus.
“Instead of putting it on [the glass walls], I would like to put the images on actual walls,” Zhu said. “If we have more budget, we’ll have more images because we had some really good ones that we had to cut.”
The Grinnell Photography Club has already reached out to other organizations on campus, such as the Student Publications and Radio Committee, with hopes of creating its first photography book.
Ultimately, Ruiz and the other photographers in the club hope to recruit more club members to make the next photography project even more successful than this semester’s.
