Animal Topiary Night Photography
The bunny topiary and squirrel topiary images were shot during last week's full moon for an upcoming night photography exhibit called Nocturnes...in Berkeley? that runs from July 14th-August 22nd at The Lightroom in Berkeley.
The images were shot with a Mamiya 7II and 43mm lens using Fuji 64T slide film, and the slides were drum scanned. The resulting sharpness and resolution is extremely impressive - these prints could easily go to 4 feet on the long side. I'm not sure how big I'm going to print for the show, as mounting and framing costs are always a constraint. But wouldn't it be cool to have a 4 foot bunny or squirrel topiary print?
In addition to shooting neighborhood plant sculptures in the middle of the night for the show, I was also asked to write an artist statement, and here's how it goes:
Joe Reifer lives in Berkeley. He thinks talking about yourself in the third person is funny. Joe's night work focuses on temporary, obsolete, abandoned, and derelict sites. He also enjoys shooting mundane suburban neighborhoods in the daytime with toy cameras. An apartment with stone facing, shrubberies, a jetski in the side yard – all become strange dream fodder embedded in a fuzzy snapshot.
A strange confluence of events led Joe to investigate a new hybrid of his parallel bodies of work for this show -- including a running topiary joke on the TV program Little Britain, and the acquiring of a map called Hidden Gems of Berkeley. If a nicely trimmed hedge is interesting when shot on a sunny afternoon with a Holga, how does it look at night? I hope the resulting images inspire you to give the details in your neighborhood another look under the moonlight.