Hop the Fence

On Sunday night Matt & Melissa Eich and I had a group of local photographers over for a Hop-the-Fence Photo Night between our houses, ending with a show in my garage, projected onto an ancient screen salvaged from a back closet at the paper. By fortunate accident, the house I'm renting in Norfolk is right behind the Eichs', and when the water get too high, as it sometimes does, I just park my car in front of their house and hop the fence to get to my house. Norfolk has an unusually high concentration of talented photographers right now, and it was wonderful to get some of them in the same room to talk about their current projects, their challenges, and whatever else it is we talked about throughout that long night. Tim Gruber and Jenn Ackerman came up from their retreat on the Outer Banks, Ross Taylor showed work from a recent trip to Bangledesh, local photographer Jesse Hutcheson showed work from his senior project, and two students from ODU, Shane and Caroline, showed their recent projects. It was a kind of relief, to spend an evening just looking and listening, watching work that is being created for myriad reasons. Matt (who showed work on gator hunting) and I are hoping to make this a bi-monthly occurrence, so if you live nearby or are passing through, let me know if you'd like to join in.