Reid Callanan
Reid Callanan is Founder and Director of Santa Fe Workshops, currently in its 34th year offering photography and writing workshops to a world-wild audience. In addition to in-person workshops in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Workshops has had a campus in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico since 2001. Online workshops and international travel programs to Morocco, Scotland, Viet Nam, Turkey, Iceland, Paris, Rome, Portugal, Spain, India, Romania, and Cuba round out its year-round educational offerings.
In 1994, Reid founded the non-profit Santa Fe Center for Photography, now known as CENTER, and is currently Vice- President of its Board of Directors. He serves on the President’s Council for Texas Photographic Society; on the Board for American Society of Media Photographers Foundation; on the Advisory Board for Bertha Crosley Ball Center for Compassion, and most recently on the Board for the National Center for The Photograph.
Reid started photographing in 1974 during a semester abroad at Richmond College in London and has been making images ever since using a variety of photographic processes including silver halide, Polaroid imagery, and now digital capture. His photographic projects include a personal diary of images called HOMESCAPES, black-and-white portraits made in Cuba and Mexico, and most recently iPhone travel images.
ARTIST STATEMENT
For fifty years, I have used a variety of cameras to explore and discover the world. I have learned to use photography as a diary to document what I notice and my thoughts and feelings about these glimmers of attention. I record light and color, gesture and beauty, and fleeting moments. Carrying a camera is an opener of conversation and doors, but cameras don't take pictures. A camera is a hunk of metal, but in my hands a creative tool for personal expression. I make photographs from my imagination, curiosity, heart, and often not looking through the viewfinder.
My favorite cameras are the ones I find easiest to use. Push one button and an image is recorded on film or a sensor. I often miss the moment if I have too many equipment decisions, and it is about moments – slivers of time captured. Many of the photographs in this exhibition were made between 1976 to 2005 with Polaroid SX-70 Autofocus cameras, and more recently with Apple iPhones. The Polaroids are singular, one-of-a-kind images on Time-Zero film made with color dyes that have surprisingly not faded over these many years. For the past ten years, I have made photographs using the camera in my iPhone. I edit a few in-phone and then export them to Adobe Lightroom so I can print them on Epson Exhibition Fiber Paper.
This exhibition contains my favorite homescapes and travelscapes.
