Three years ago, award-winning Florida photographer John Moran decided to change his approach. For three decades, he had been making the sort of pictures that cause people to fall in love with the state: breathtaking landscapes full of majestic palms and crystalline water, intimate close-ups of elusive wildlife. Moran even left a 23-year career at the Gainesville Sun to pursue such images full-time. They were his life’s work.
Carousel No. 4
Wed., Nov. 5, 6:30-9 p.m., Kress Building, 811 N. Franklin Street, Tampa, $5 suggested donation, carouselshow.com, facebook.com/carouselshow.
Then Moran realized that his pictures were telling only half of the story. The flip side of the enduring beauty of natural environments like Florida’s springs is their increasing destruction. Turning his lens on evidence of the damage caused to springs by pollution and groundwater overuse, he began to package his pictures into an exhibit with help from Leslie Gamble, an art historian, and designer Rick Kilby. (Titled Springs Eternal Project, the show is on display now at Florida Gateway College in Lake City.) With the new images, mixed with “before” shots of pristine waters from years past, Moran hoped he would get a different kind of reaction.
“I’ve got pictures of slime-encrusted springs that will break your heart and piss you off,” he says.
Moran is one of nine image-makers who will present their work on Wednesday at Carousel No. 4, a public slide-show party that kicks off the inaugural Tampa Bay Design Week (Nov. 5-8) in downtown Tampa. Todd Bates, a designer and photographer who until recently was CL’s Creative Director, founded the event after returning to St. Petersburg four years ago from Seattle, where he was inspired by Slideluck Potshow, a combination potluck dinner and artist show-and-tell with projected images that has spread to cities around the world.
Now almost three years old, Carousel has earned a local following by jumping from one hip location (the Studio@620) to another (Green Bench Brewing), assembling a diverse group of top photographers from Tampa Bay (and sometimes beyond) each time. The mix of shooters lined up for Carousel No. 4, which ranges from acclaimed journalists like Moran to budding art stars, is the most enticing yet. So is the venue — the historic Kress Building on N. Franklin Street, a beloved but vacant structure that many see as a critical (and so far, missing) piece of downtown Tampa’s revitalization.
Carousel No. 4 will have its own hyper-local urban slant, thanks to presentations by Bates and Bob Croslin, a former Tampa Bay Times photographer. Bates plans to unveil a series of images of vintage neon signs photographed throughout Florida and Washington State over the past nine months. His gambit is to isolate iconic logos — such as that of the Landmark Motel, a red-and-white St. Pete favorite situated on 4th Street North across from Sunken Gardens — from their sometimes less-than-flattering backgrounds, liberating the signs’ graphic impact for full nostalgic effect. Croslin will show portraits taken at the Skatepark of Tampa’s 20th anniversary last year, replete with athletic bodies, punk-rock outfits and tattooed skin.
For something completely different, they’ll be joined by two USF art students who bring a rawer, weirder edge to the stage. Kristen Roles, a 22-year-old who graduates with her BFA in December, plays as significant a role in front of her camera as behind it. Inside quirky domestic interiors — mostly the homes of friends and neighbors in St. Pete — she subjects herself to vaguely embarrassing and uncomfortable performances, from full-body hugging a Christmas tree in the nude to encumbering her pale body with low-budget prostheses made from sandbags wrapped in pantyhose. Roles’ long, flame-colored hair, typically flipped forward to obscure her face, lends each performance a feral note.
Jaroslaw Studencki, an MFA student who previously graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago, works in a more documentary mode, candidly exploring the identity, sexuality and homes of working-class Floridians.
Presentations by Pierre Dutertre, Elaine Litherland, Matt Marriott and Scott McIntyre round out the event.