FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 7, 2016
Contact: Tamar Russell Brown, Gallery Sitka — 978.425.6290
Married Couple to Exhibit Photographic Landscapes from All over the World at The Bull Run in Shirley
SHIRLEY, Mass. — Chester and Stephie Hooper are partners in life — and in art. Married for 40 years now, they have also long shared a passion for taking pictures. They will exhibit landscapes (and a few cityscapes) from two continents at The Bull Run in Shirley on March 19.
The Hoopers are drawn principally to nature photography, though Stephie shoots primarily in color and Chet in black & white. Stephie uses a Leica M4 camera with Kodak color negative film. Chet uses a Swedish camera, a Hasselblad he has been working with for 12 years. He uses Kodak Tri-X film and enjoys producing the images in the darkroom he built at the couple’s home in Harvard, Mass.
Stephie has always loved experimenting with design and composition, and she finds landscapes an ideal medium for photography. In the great outdoors she has the opportunity to frame the photo, to zero in on a particularly fascinating image that might otherwise be lost amid all the other scenery.
“I love capturing what’s beneath the surface” of what she finds in natural settings, Stephie says. She is keenly sensitive to the “the moods and gradations of color” that she sees and captures on film.
The artists travel a great deal, enjoying tours organized by the National Geographic Society. A native of the San Francisco Bay area, Stephie toured Europe as a youth, taking pictures all along the route. She and Chet recently traveled to Szczecin, Poland, where Chet was speaking at a legal conference called by the Polish maritime industry. Stephie was thus able to photograph many images in Poland and also on a trip to Berlin.
Stephie’s guides were two young Polish lawyers. Stephie was struck by her guides’ worldviews, which naturally were very different from those of their parents, who grew up in Cold War Poland under Soviet rule. Chet especially likes an image Stephie caught in Berlin — a shot of him taking his own shot of the Holocaust Memorial.
Stephie will also exhibit pictures of the grand, breathtaking beauty of Yosemite National Park in California and ocean vistas from Nantucket. Chet’s photos for this exhibit were shot in the areas around the towns of Shirley, Lancaster and Harvard. “I like to bring out the beauty of the area in which we live,” he says.
Stephie and Chet take a lot of pictures at their vacation home at Fort Pond, in Lancaster. “The house has been in Chet’s family for almost one hundred years,” Stephie reports. Chet’s father and uncles built the house on land to which they walked from Shirley to swim as teenagers. Fall colors there, Stephie says, are always spectacular.
This exciting exhibition will take place at The Bull Run, 215 Great Road in Shirley, Mass., on Saturday, March 19, 3 ̶ 5 p.m. Visit sitkacreations.com for more information about the Hoopers and their combined body of work in photography.
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