■ Photos of ‘Bones … to be Still’ explore shadow, texture

By Keri Luiz
Assistant Editor

Christine Benkert came up with the idea for her current black-and-white photography exhibit, “Bones … to be Still,” almost accidentally.

Benkert had been feeling like she needed to get back into a regular pattern of taking photos. “I had been off, and a little bit in a void. I had gotten sidetracked and needed to get back on board,” she said.

“I needed to commit myself to some kind of time thing.”

She decided to spending every Wednesday, the entire day, working with a 4×5 format camera.

The 4×5 is the most common of large-format cameras. A 4×5 inch image has about 16 times the area — and thus 16 times the total resolution — of a 35 mm frame.

Benkert, spending one day a week with a 4×5, started by simply grabbing something in her studio and playing around with color. But nothing quite clicked.

Then, “I had this bone that I had found in southern New Mexico on a hike.” The jawbone of a large animal travelled with her back to Minneapolis, where she was living at the time, and she kept it through her moves to New Mexico and eventually California.

“I always had it sitting out on a table top because I kind of create still-lifes in my house. So I went for that.”

Eventually Benkert’s Wednesdays evolved into going to her studio and shooting black-and-white arrangements of the jawbone. Soon rocks were integrated into the scene. “The whole thing evolved into one bone and three or four rocks. It is the same in every shot,” she said.

“It was very meditative for me. Very methodical.”

With a 4×5, the work is shot in black-and-white negatives, then scanned into a computer, where minor corrections — like spot retouching in Adobe Photoshop — can be done with much greater ease than in a darkroom.

Benkert points out that “there’s nothing moved to a different place, or taken out, or put in or anything like that,” she said.

Now hanging dramatically on the white walls of Gallery 621, the finished product — a series of large, striking photographs — demand attention, and a closer look.

One thing that stands out is the commonality of each piece. Shadows cut into weatherbeaten shapes. The jawbone, the rocks, some black sand that looks like the star-filled night sky — they are so crisp, their texture so stark that they appear to be three-dimensional.

They seem like they’re coming right off the satiny Hannemuhle paper that Benkert used for the prints. “Each of these shots, it’s like one shot a day,” she said.

Being a relative newcomer to the San Francisco Bay Area has given Benkert new ideas for her shooting. “I’m shooting in the fog. I’m shooting more outdoors, but creating still-lifes. When I’m working on location, mostly it’s on a tripod, finding things that exist out there but have similarities to this (the exhibit).

“They’re abstract, or quiet or busy and abstract. But there is some kind of natural order to them.”

If You Go
An opening reception for Christine Benkert’s “Bones … to be Still” will be held Saturday at Gallery 621, 621 First St., from 5-8 p.m.