February 4-27, 2010

Reception: Sunday, February 7, 3-5 pm

Maggie Rheinstein

Following her career of singing and opera, Maggie Rheinstein returned to photography, studying digital techniques with Eliot Cohen. Though creative expression has consistently fueled her life's work, Maggie is equally energized by a compassion for children in need.

Maggie volunteers for the Make-a-Wish Foundation and traveled to remote villages in Gujarat, India, villages devastated by the 2001 earthquake and still recovering in 2008. Her photos show the surviving children and reveal details of their Kutch culture. Most images are of young girls — their exceptional beauty and Kutch colors stand in contrast to the impoverishment of a barren existence.

Maggie plans to donate proceeds of her sales to The Hope Foundation as it continues to support the earthquake recovery.

Larry Ponsford

Larry Ponsford is a Washington architect who has spent most of his career planning, designing, building and regulating some of the large-scale changes to our physical world, from southern California to the middle east. He has been photographing these and many other features of his travels for over forty years.

Larry has been gradually refocusing his longstanding relationship with photography. He originally used photography to help him teach architecture, and later to document aspects of his extensive travels. More and more, though, his photos allow — even suggest — a wide range of interpretations by both the photographer and the viewers. Larry has chosen 22 images from his career archive of some 8000 photos, and several illustrate his growing interest in using architecture as subject matter for abstract image-making.

The "Looking Up" theme alludes to how our eyes, deluged with images, must edit what to see: so we routinely focus on the thin layer of world between our feet and our head, ignoring whatever wonders, surprises or delights may be "soaring" just overhead. These photos suggest that there are rewards for our readopting the dying habit of "Looking Up".