Diana Bloomfield is already having a great year, and its only March

Raleigh, NC-based photographer Diana Bloomfield is having a great 2013, and its only March.

She has just been awarded first place honors in a national photography contest hosted by Brilliant Studio in Exton, PA. with her image, above.

This honor comes just as plans for two major exhibitions are coming into focus, one in Virginia and the other in Oregon. 

The show in Virginia is at the great Southern fine art photography gallery Kiernan Gallery, in  Lexington, VA, where Kat Kiernan does an outstanding job of exhibiting fine art photography.  You can keep up with her and the Kiernan Gallery at her blog, here.

Bloomfield will be doing a solo show of work from her Vignettes portfolio at the Kiernan Gallery, opening May 1st, and up through June 1st, 2013, see image below.

In Oregon, Bloomfield is doing several things at the Light Box Gallery in Astoria. She is part of a two-person show of gum bichromate prints, called Two Friends who Never Met, jointly with the distinguished photographer and printer Katharine Thayer.

This show is a memorial and tribute show for the work of Katharine Thayer, who died recently. Along with the show of her work and of Bloomfiend's, there is a group show of gum bichromate printing, juried by Bloomfield. 

All of this opens on May 11th, and is up in Oregon through June 1st, 2013.And all of this came about because Bloomfield and Thayer met and conducted a long and happy friendship and professional association, all over the internet, without actually ever having met in person.

Oh brave new world . . . . .

Bloomfield is a long-time alternative processes photographer and printer. She has been doing fine work in Raleigh  and exhibiting her distinctive images from the American South to the West Coast, and to China and beyond. 

Bloomfield specializes in pinhole and toy cameras, which suit her aesthetic sensibilities and photographic vision of the world, a vision concerned with past memories, of half-remembered dreams, of visual narratives. 

Traditional and historic processes, for her, fit this vision, as do the unusual perspectives, the long exposures, and what she calls the "sense of  movement and fluidity," and the "dream-like quality" she gets from her cameras. 

There is also the hands-on quality, the tactile engagement with the materials, the incorporation of "surprises and happy accidents" she describes as getting from gum bichromate as well as from other labor intensive alternative processes she uses like platinum and cyanotype printing.

Somehow, I sense a connection between the romantic side of Southern awareness and the kind of work Bloomfield produces. This is "made" work, work that engages a felt reality, that embodies a vision of that reality, in ways that photographs shot on digital cameras with crystal sharp lenses and printed on ink jet printers really cannot approximate.

Great to see Bloomfield's career blossoming in new ways. Long may it thrive!