Visitors had just started walking into the first professional exhibit of the newly built One Grove Gallery inside Buffalo Grove High School, and something caught the exhibitor’s eye.
Trevor Reisz looked at his own photograph print — an orange-and-gray blob of indiscernible shapes — and became vexed.
It had been mounted upside down. He knew which way the globulous shapes on his print were supposed to be facing, so he pulled it off the wall, flipped it and stuck it back on again.
Q: Even just 10 years ago, photography was still a mythical thing. Today, almost everyone uses a camera regularly —and plenty of them have turned out to be competent photographers. What has it been like to watch something that was once esoteric and vaunted become everyone’s hobby?
A: It’s very easy to answer. I’m very happy that everyone can do that. No matter how lacking you are in creativity, technology, motivation, it doesn’t matter —you can put that phone into anybody’s hands, the exposure will be correct, and the picture will be decent. You’re going to take beautiful pictures, I guarantee you. What the computer doesn’t do is make the picture into a photograph. It doesn’t give you composition, it doesn’t give you cropping, automatically. It doesn’t tell you about leading lines. I’ve got the latest digital cameras; my favorite camera is 30 years old. When I pick up that tool, I don’t think, I know it so well. The problem with the iPhone is that people aren’t using them to see the world better.
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Q: What do you hope to tell Buffalo Grove through the pictures you’ve selected for this?
A: The hope that a student gets excited about a medium, and says “Wow.” The main thing I tell people is that you’re going to see the world better than people who are not photographers.
Q: You surely have a favorite creation here — and it surely gets passed over by many visitors, who think little of it. What is it like to put your work on display, photos and paintings you’re especially proud of, and watch most people look at most of them and think “Eh?”
A: It doesn’t matter to me, at all. That’s not why I put it up there. I’m very technically oriented; at the same time, I’ve very creative. My painting is totally unrelated to my photography. Sometimes my painting is pure crap. I probably throw away 70 percent of what I paint, because I don’t know when to stop.
— Ronnie Wachter, Pioneer Press