Photographers in Arlington got a chance Thursday night to meet the man who judged the 540 entries in the Ellipse Photo Show this year, Volkmar Wentzel.
"There is lots of originality here," Wentzel said of Arlington and the artists who contributed to the show. "You can judge photography from many points of view. I just did my best."
Wentzel, a 42-year veteran of National Geographic Magazine, explained his criteria for judging the artwork, emphasizing artistic creativity and technical skill. The show featured work representing more than 107 photographers from Arlington and throughout the Washington area, according to Cynthia Connoly, the museum's manager and curator. The juror's prize went to "Aztec Light" by Robin Burkett. Among the other award winners was one of a series of pictures by local photographer John Babineau. Its subject is ordinary men doing ordinary work, like painting houses, trimming leaves and laboring outside.
"I've come to regard this theme as one that reflects a fleeting nobility," said Babineau, a teacher of photography in the county's adult education program. "The solitary figure on the landscape has interested me for many years. I observe men at work, at play, at ordinary moments in which the figure hovers briefly in a contemplative, dream-like state within the variables of the surrounding landscape."
Wentzel said he was drawn to photography as a young boy in Dresden when his father, a photo chemist, made him a rudimentary pinhole camera. He would later serve as a darkroom technician for Underwood and Underwood, a photography company in New York City. It was in that job, Wentzel said, that he found his first assignment as a photojournalist, when a friend with one of the local newspapers asked him to get a shot of the French ambassador's wife. It was his first venture as a professional.
"All photographers are amateurs, even if they are professionals," Wentzel said.
WENTZEL OFFERED his thoughts on the evolution of photography from early glass plates to film, digital pictures to photoshop. Digital photography, he said, is a logical next step for the medium.
"It is one of the milestones of photography," he said. "Everyone thinks digital is simple because all you do is push a button, but it is more than that. All photography takes dedication, application and work."
Wentzel's work in New York landed him a job as a technician in the Washington darkrooms of the National Geographic. Yet his hectic schedule of dodging and retouching prints for the magazine left him little time during the day to pursue his photographic talents. He began shooting at night. The result was a book, "Washington by Night," a now famous retrospective of the capital after dark. After serving as an aerial photographer and intelligence analyst in World War II, Wentzel hopped a freighter from Baltimore harbor, bound for India. His assignment was a two-year "photo survey" of the sub-continent for the Geographic. It was there that Wentzel photographed a series of Buddhist paintings in the Ajanta Cave. Surrounded by bats, Wentzel said he worked for days to construct a scaffold just to get close enough to shoot the centuries-old artwork.
"It helps a photographer to learn the customs of a place," Wentzel said. "Especially in India, I was able to make an impression among the people there in the temples and monasteries because I was able to identify the significance of the various gods they depicted. It allowed me to immediately make a connection with them."
Wentzel is now in talks with the Smithsonian for a show in 2006 highlighting Americana.
Photographs from the show will remain on display at the Ellipse Arts Center, 4350 N. Fairfax Drive, in Ballston, until Feb. 26. The show is an annual event.