BRATTLEBORO-The Vermont Center for Photography (VCP) wraps up its third annual silent auction Friday, Oct. 30 with a big celebration at its headquarters at 10 Green St. in Brattleboro.
From 5 to 8 pm, “there’ll be food and drinks and festivities, but you know, with an auction, the big hurrah is the closing of the bidding” which will be at 7 p.m., says VCP Executive Director Joshua Farr.
This year’s VCP auction, a major fundraiser, features a record number of donations — 103 submissions — from a record number of artists and collectors to date, says Farr.
“It’s a really special kind of exhibit for us,” Farr said, noting that donations all came “from within our network and our community, people with some kind of connection to VCP.”
While prints have been received from artists in the Netherlands and from the West Coast, most of the donated works that fill the well-lit walls of the VCP exhibit space are from New England and New York.
“We’ve been thoughtful about the work that’s on display and trying to curate a more deliberate collection of images both from artists directly and from local and regional collectors who contribute pieces,” Farr explains.
Often works by historical photographers, now deceased, are donated to the mix, and this year those include “several pieces that would generally come from collectors, both regionally or nationally,” he says.
And those museum-quality pieces “hang alongside our own beloved, local or regional photographers, [including] “younger emerging photographers.”
“A few photography books and limited edition portfolios are part of the exhibit, as well,” Farr adds.
Until Oct. 30, all 103 pieces can be viewed in detail on the VCP website as well as in the Center’s main gallery.
Re-homing old equipment
Meanwhile, the VCP is nurturing its other offerings, including the Photo Thrift wing of the nonprofit’s operations.
“People donate equipment they had or that belonged to their parents or family members,” says Enrico Catanzariti, program and operations assistant, who runs the exchange.
Photo Thrift “helps find new homes” for the full spectrum of items neatly shelved and categorized in a shop space at the entrance to the VCP, he says.
Whatever one needs — from a safelight and other darkroom equipment to film and a 35mm camera — chances are, he says, “we’ve got it all in the store.”
“We sell a lot of equipment to schools and other folks, either establishing or redeveloping community darkroom spaces across the country,” Catanzariti says.
“Since everything is donated to us, it’s really easy for us to discount some gear for an educational institution or for a young person coming in trying to get their first film camera,” he observes.
“Yeah, it’s a one of a kind,” says Catanzariti.
A flexible space
In 2021, the VCP moved to the High Street & Green building, where its space also boasts a public darkroom and a public digital lab, both of which are rented to individual creators and used for private tutorials and group workshops.
“It’s just a flexible space,” says Farr.
VCP staff tries “to cover a lot of the basics,” he says, including, for instance, offering mentoring on writing an artist’s statement, submitting to exhibitions, and applying for grants.
On average once a month, Farr adds, VCP offers an artist talk.
“We have a guest artist come in, whether it’s tied specifically to an exhibition that’s in the gallery or just a stand-alone artist talk,” he says. “They’ll come in and give a whole presentation about a body of their work.”
The artist talks draw anywhere from a dozen to 60 people, and are all recorded, Farr says. The recordings are archived on the VCP’s YouTube page.
Farr notes that in addition to the labs, events, and exhibits at VCP, “the library is another big deal of this place.”
The lending library, agrowing collection of more than 2,000 books about photography and photographers, was organized two years ago by Forest Simon, then an intern, now VCP’s communications director. Each week one is highlighted as the Book of the Week.
Simon oversees newsletter production and social media outreach while he schedules and coordinates artist talks and monthly workshops.
“I handle our back-end membership database,” he says, calling the VCP’s membership base a “vital way that we gain funding.”
“There’s nothing offered here where a membership is required [for access], but member support is part of the funding pie for the VCP,” Simon says.
Analog photography in a digital age
Farr, Simon, and Catanzariti mused for a bit on the state of the art of photography, specifically citing a trend: the return to analog equipment.
“Photography for a really long time has existed primarily digitally, and I think over the past handful of years, especially with the younger crowd, we’ve seen a much larger return to analog photography and using film,” Farr observes.
And that is really part of what “has made Photo Thrift so successful,” he says — “that plenty of people are willing to give up their older film cameras and then you have a younger generation getting really excited about having that tactile physical medium again.”
Today’s photographers are “rediscovering the film media, but they still speak the digital language,” Farr says.
“They’re shooting the vintage cameras, developing the film by hand in the darkroom,” he continues, “and then they walk straight into the digital lab and they scan the film on our scanners onto the computer.”
Then, he says, they post their color film analog photos on Instagram.
“So it’s sort of a funny, ironic hybrid thing happening,” Farr observes.
“I think they just really enjoy the tactile experience like driving a manual transmission car,” he says. “It’s just being able to set all the settings and the vintage vibe of it. They love it a lot. It feels real.”
Farr sees a trend.
“Like, now the darkroom is becoming like a new form of community building,” a social hub for younger people. “Darkrooms are blossoming all over, especially in the cities.”
It’s not too hard to score a film camera these days for a reasonable price, but then there’s the cost of film and processing.
The roll of film itself, Catanzariti says, “could cost like $15. Sending it out to a lab to be developed and scanned could be another $15, but in our darkroom, it’d be much cheaper. You could come in and in one hour develop four or five rolls of film, and that would save you a lot of money.”
Developing a funding stream
“We are in a relatively unique place,” says Farr, “where probably 60% to 70% of our funding is what I would call earned income” from Photo Thrift sales, from workshops and classes, from fine art printing services, and the lab space rentals.
Beyond that, VCP relies more on individual donors than grants, though the organization did just receive a Vermont Arts Council three-year, $10,000 operating grant.
“Most of our other grants are very project-based,” Farr said, noting funding from the Thomas Thompson Trust to support VCP’s free introductory class in digital photography for “folks in recovery from substance use disorder.”
But “because grant funding is so underrepresented, it just makes our other fundraising events like this auction even more important,” he says.
Last year’s auction yielded $11,000; this year, the goal is $13,500.
“Percentage-wise, it’s only a slice of the pie but increasingly, just every single one of those slices becomes more important and necessary,” Farr says.
Farr reminds that “bidding is actively open online for the duration of the show.” On Oct. 30 at 7 p.m., when bids close, the online auction is scheduled to automatically shut itself down, and the highest bidders win.
The trio stresses, though, that a big part of the auction is “just a social occasion to meet up, as well as to take another in-person look at the work” before bidding.
Sliding-scale in-person admission is $5–$25 and features a complimentary photo booth, exclusive closing night auction items, music, plenty of food and drinks, and a few surprises.
For more information about the Vermont Center for Photography’s silent auction — and its classes, workshops, exhibits, facilities, Photo Thrift, and arts sales — visit vcphoto.org.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.