Date: November 4, 2014 – 6:00-8:00pm
As part of a planned series on understanding photography through time, Victoria Restrepo will walk us through a history of photography. She will take us back in time to the discovery of the principle of the camera obscura and the observation that some substances are visibly altered by exposure to light. We will follow the story of how some artists and scientists faced the challenge of bring these two phenomena together to capture camera images in permanent form, and how the new invention changed their world forever.
We will learn about the three pioneers who, with their hard work, their defeats, their envy and jealousy, and finally their triumphs, managed to surprise the world with the magic of their new invention. We will explore the development of the Daguerreotype, the Calotype, and the Wet Collodion Process, and how the art world reacted toward these new media. We will study some of the most important photographers and their work, and how they have influenced our vision and aesthetics.
Restrepo, a former presenter at IPS, is an accomplished professional photographer as well as an artist with over 30 years of experience, specializing in fine art, nature and travel photography. Victoria’s grandfather, her great-grandfather and her great-great-grandfather were some of the earliest photographers in South America and the Caribbean. The smell of photographic chemicals and the magical darkness of her family lab have marked her life forever.
She studied fine arts in Colombia and photography at the New England School of Photography in Boston. She has worked as a commercial photographer and as a photography and Photoshop teacher, and has an art studio for children.
