©Coco Fronsac, Dionaea muscipulae et le ruban jaune

In an era when it’s rare for a brick and mortar gallery to open, it’s incredibly exciting to celebrate the opening of the Obsura Gallery, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For their Inaugural Exhibition, Gallery Director/Owner Jennifer Schlesinger is featuring “five pioneering female Obscura Gallery artists working in contemporary approaches to early photographic process, all exhibiting brand new work or work never before seen in New Mexico.” Included in the exhibition are Susan Burnstine, Brigitte Carnochan, Coco Fronsac, Aline Smithson, and Joyce Tenneson.” As Jennifer Schlesinger states: “The exhibition title, Limelight, is inspired by and celebrates the late New York Greenwich Village pioneer gallerist Helen Gee and her gallery of the same name started in 1954. Gee’s gallery was the first successful and enduring exhibition space devoted exclusively to selling photography during the post Second World War era in New York. Her enthusiasm and passion for photography are a huge parallel inspiration to Obscura Gallery.” Limelight opens on  on July 14, 2018, 4-7pm and is on view until August 3rd, 2018.

©Susan Burnstine, Into the Headlands

Susan Burnstine portrays her dream-like visions entirely in-camera, rather than with post-processing manipulations. To achieve this, she created twenty-one hand-made film cameras and lenses that are frequently unpredictable and technically challenging. The cameras are primarily made out of plastic, vintage camera parts and random household objects and the single element lenses are molded out of plastic and rubber. Learning to overcome their extensive limitations has her to rely on instinct and intuition… the same tools that are key when trusting in the unseen.

Susan Burnstine is an award winning fine art and commercial photographer originally from Chicago now based in Los Angeles. Susan is represented in galleries across the world, widely published throughout the globe and has also written for several photography magazines, including a monthly column for Black and White Magazine (UK) Nominated for the 2009 Santa Fe Prize for Photography and winner of B&W Magazine’s 2008 Portfolio Spotlight Award.

Susan’s first monograph, ‘Within Shadows’, was published by Charta Editions. Within Shadows earned the Gold award for PX3 Prix De La Photographie Paris in the Professional Fine Art Books category and a Bronze overall and was selected for the 2011 Photo Eye Booklist. Susan’s second monograph, ‘Absence of Being’, was released in Fall 2016 and was published by Damiani Editore.

©Susan Burnstine, Across Old Albion Road

©Susan Burnstine, Crossing West

©Susan Burnstine, Daybreak Grant Street

©Susan Burnstine, Lost Highway

Brigitte Carnochan’s photographs are exhibited in galleries and museums nationally and internationally. Her work is in museum, corporate and private collections.

Hudson Hills Press published Floating World in January, 2013. The book is a collection of images and poems, the twin arts of photography and poetry, where Brigitte Carnochan’s illusions complement the poetry of Japanese women from the 7th to the 19th Century. Both the trade edition of the book and the limited edition book with a special edition image are available in the gallery.

In 2006, Modernbook Editions published Bella Figura: Painted Photographs by Brigitte Carnochan. A limited edition monograph of her work, The Shining Path, was published by 21st Publications that same year.

Carnochan was named a Hasselblad Master Photographer for 2003 and her work has been featured on the covers of Camera Arts and Silvershotz and has been published in Color, Lenswork, Zoom, View Camera, Polaroid, Black and White, and Studija magazines. There are three photographic catalogs of her work. She teaches photography classes through the Stanford University Continuing Studies program.

©Brigitte Carnochan, Consider the Lilies

©Brigitte Carnochan, Daisy Field

©Brigitte Carnochan, Helianthus

©Brigitte Carnochan, Sunday Morning Roses

©Brigitte Carnochan, Valley Grasses V

Coco Fronsac: Born in 1962 in France, and trained at the Applied Arts of Paris, Fronsac comes from a family of artists. She was a former lithographer, and influenced and passionate about First Arts and Surrealism. She explores many worlds that invite her to discover her dreamlike and timeless world.

What if the photo did not freeze the moment? If it were only a beginning, a trial for the future?

Fronsac starts with unique vintage photographs then adds collage, carvings, painting, colorization, and juxtaposition.

Coco Fronsac plays with our vision of time, our relationship to the other, to better project ourselves into a new fluctuating, living, subjective reality.

She lives and works in Paris.

©Coco Fronsac, Boitre Alerte

©Coco Fronsac, Dionaea muscipulae et le ruban jaune

©Coco Fronsac, la branche daubepine

©Coco Fronsac, Les presents apotropaiques

©Coco Fronsac, Reflexion avec elle meme seule a la maison

Aline Smithson: After a career as a New York Fashion Editor and working along side the greats of fashion photography, Aline Smithson discovered the family Rolleiflex and never looked back. Now represented by galleries in the U.S. and Europe and published throughout the world, Aline continues to create her award-winning photography with humor, compassion, and a 50-year-old camera.

She has exhibited widely including solo shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art, the Lishui Festival in China, the Tagomago Gallery in Barcelona and Paris, and the Wallspace Gallery in Seattle and Santa Barbara. In addition, her work is held in a number of public collections. Her photographs have been featured in publications including PDN (cover), the PDN Photo Annual, Communication Arts Photo Annual, Eyemazing, Soura, Visura, Fraction,Artworks, NY Times LENS blog, Shots, Pozytyw, and Silvershotz magazines. In the Fall of 2015, the Magenta Foundation will publish her first significant monograph, Self & Others: Portrait as Autobiography.

In 2012, Aline received the Rising Star Award through the Griffin Museum of Photography for her contributions to the photographic community. In 2014, Aline’s work was selected for the Critical Mass Top 50, the PDN Photo Annual, and Review Santa Fe. Aline founded and writes LENSCRATCH, a daily magazine that celebrates a different contemporary photographer each day and offers opportunity for exhibition. She has been the Gallery Editor for Light Leaks Magazine, is a contributing writer for Diffusion, Don’t Take Pictures, Lucida, and F Stop Magazines, has written book reviews for photo-eye, and has provided the forewords for artist’s books by Tom Chambers, Flash Forward 12, Robert Rutoed, Nancy Baron, amongst others.

Aline has curated and juried exhibitions for a number of galleries, organizations, and on-line magazines, including Review Santa Fe, Critical Mass, Flash Forward, and the Griffin Museum. In addition, she is a reviewer and educator at many photo festivals across the United States. In 2014, Aline received the Excellence in Teaching Award from CENTER, but she considers her children her greatest achievement. She is a founding member of the Six Shooters Collective and is currently teaching at the Los Angeles Center of Photography, the Santa Fe Photo Workshops, and the Maine Media Workshops. Aline lives and works in Los Angeles.

©Aline Smithson, Cory

©Aline Smithson, Geisha

©Aline Smithson, Julila

©Aline Smithson, Lisa

©Aline Smithson, Melanesia

Joyce Tenneson: Internationally lauded as one of the leading photographers of her generation, Joyce Tenneson’s work has been published in books and major magazines, and exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. Her portraits have appeared on covers for magazines such as: Time, Life, Newsweek, Premiere, Esquire and The New York Times Magazine.

Vicki Goldberg, critic and author, writes of Tenneson: “Tenneson possesses a unique vision which makes her photographs immediately recognizable. She creates enigmatic and sensuous images that are timeless and haunting.”

Tenneson is the author of sixteen books including the best seller, Wise Women, which was featured in a six-part Today Show series. She is the recipient of many awards, including Fine Art Photographer of the Year in 2005 (Lucie Awards), and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Professional Photographers of America in 2012.  In the Fall of 2014, Fotografiska Museum, in Stockholm, Sweden, mounted a large retrospective of her work. Tenneson’s work has been exhibited in museums around the globe and is part of many private and public collections.

In addition to her photography exhibits and books, Tenneson has taught master photography classes in the U.S. and Europe for over 40 years.

©Joyce Tenneson, Five Birches in Fog

©Joyce Tenneson, Apple Tree

©Joyce Tenneson, Fall Lake

©Joyce Tenneson, Glowing Tree

©Joyce Tenneson, Majestic Oak

About Obscura Gallery:
Obscura Gallery was formed by Owner and DirectorJennifer Schlesinger. A photography dealer, and artist herself, Jennifer brings to Obscura Gallery the experience of being the Director of Verve Gallery of Photography in Santa Fe, New Mexico for eleven years until they closed in 2017.

Obscura Gallery, conceived in 2016, and named after the original Camera Obscura, was founded on Jennifer’s passion for photography which is deeply rooted in the history of the medium. The Gallery encourages the ways in which contemporary artists are using photography to create unique additions to the history of the medium which began nearly 200 years ago.The contemporary artists represented are William Albert Allard (Charlottesville, VA), Michael Berman (Mimbres Valley, NM), Susan Burnstine (Los Angeles, CA), Debbie Fleming Caffery (Lafayette, LA), Brigitte Carnochan (Portola Valley, CA), Cy DeCosse (Minneapolis, MN), Lawrence Fodor (Santa Fe, NM), Neil Folberg (Jerusalem, Israel), Coco Fronsac (Paris, France), Louviere + Vanessa (New Orleans, LA), Kurt Markus (Santa Fe, NM), Michael Massaia (New Jersey), Norman Mauskopf (Santa Fe, NM), Caitlyn Soldan (Santa Fe, NM), Aline Smithson (Los Angeles, CA), Keith Taylor (Minneapolis, MN), and Curtis Werhfritz (Toronto, Canada).

In addition to holding exhibitions and offering for sale the artwork by Obscura Gallery’s roster of artists and other 19th – 21st gallery inventory, they also offer collection building, consulting and advising, as well as estate representation, and consignments. Obscura Gallery was granted a membership to the highly regarded Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) in 2016.

Jennifer is a long time Santa Fe resident, moving to the area from Connecticut in 1996 to graduate from the College of Santa Fe with a B.A. in Photography and Journalism in 1998. Schlesinger has exhibited her own art widely at Southwest regional institutions such as the Marion Center for Photographic Arts, Santa Fe Art Institute and the New Mexico Museum of Art, as well as national institutions such as the Southeast Museum of Photography and the Chelsea Art Museum. Schlesinger is represented in many public collections, including the Southeast Museum of Photography, FL; The New Mexico Museum of Art, and the New Mexico History Museum / Palace of the Governors Photo Archives. She has received several honors in recognition of her work including a Golden Light Award in Landscape Photography from the Maine Photographic Workshops and the Center for Contemporary Arts Photography Award in Santa Fe, New Mexico, both in 2005. She was the Assistant Director of Santa Fe Art Institute from 2003-2005 and was the Director of Verve Gallery of Photography from 2005 -2017 before becoming the Owner and Director of Obscura Gallery.