A reception was held in the Jaffe-Friede and Strauss Galleries yesterday honoring the collection of photographs by visiting artisit-in-residence Steven Trefonides. The photographs, which have been on exhibit since Sept. 20, span four decades of Trefonides work.
The photographs do not only carry their viewers from the alleys of Boston to the streets of Calcutta, but also provide an emotional journey. One moment, you are hovering over the bed of a dying woman; the next you are watching children splashing with abandon through puddles on a street in Madrid.
Among the collection's most moving photographs is one titled "Four Generations" which captures a ritualistic family visit to an old age home. In a single image, Trefonides frames the vast spectrum of human experience -- from the young boy who stares anxiously toward the camera, to the old woman, hunched and sunken in a chair only feet from him.
For Trefonides, one of the most satisfying moments as a photographer is capturing the split-second of emotion and transforming its fleeting intensity into something permanent and tangible.
"None of the pictures - none of them - are posed," Trefonides said adamantly. "In that sense, they are truth - because photography can lie. It can make things appear to be real [when] they're not."
Before the reception, Trefonides gave a lecture and presented slides of his work in the Loew Auditorium. Speaking in an accessible and unpretenious manner, he stressed the sense of timelessness he constantly tries to convey through his work.
"In this kind of photography, I look for a human, universal response," he commented after the lecture. "All of these pictures are intended to be timeless, despite where they are taken or the way people are dressed or what country it is. The emotions and what they are doing have a universal truth to it...If a man has his son in his arms and he is hugging him in a way, it's a way that everybody all over the world understands. If a girl is dancing in the streets - it's in Spain, but it could be Hanover - everybody understands, everybody has felt that way."
One of the more exciting moments in Trefonides career came in 1960, when he entered a burning building in Madras. "I went right into the fire because people thought that I was a newspaper photographer...I photographed dead bodies which I never exhibited," Trefonides said easily. "Photographs of people who are dying -- those are frightful, powerful things that a photographer does sometimes because he is able to."
Trefonides began his career as a photographer in the 1950s. He had doubts that he had the skill to capture all that he saw around him on film, but all of that changed when a friend handed him a camera and said simply, "What you see is what you get."
Before picking up a camera, Trefonides studied painting at the Vesper George School of Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Although he continues painting, he considers that aspect of his life quite separate from his work as a photographer.
Trefonides' many influences include the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andre Kertesz, Lissette Model, Robert Frank, Helen Levitt, and Manuel Alavarez Bravo.
Since discovering his photographic talent, Trefonides has had an active career. His work has been shown in the Museum of Modern Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and he has published a collection of 75 photogaphs entitled India, and four photo essays.
His work has taken him around the globe and exposed him to a range of human experience. But for Trefonides, the most satisfying moments of his career come at a time like this. "If I can move someone by what I have seen that I have done something - this is the ultimate."
Trefonides' work will be on display at the Jaffe-Friede and Strauss Galleries in Hopkins Center until October 23rd.
