Edie Swift, Robin Downs

press release: Edie Swift and Robin Downs will be exhibiting images from Nepal, Vietnam and Myanmar during the month of November. The opening reception on Thursday, November 7, at 7 PM will include a presentation with a slide show of additional photos and travel stories.

Artists’ Statements

Edie Swift: The addiction to travel came before I owned a camera.  We lived in London for a year and the intensity of the experience never left me.  I loved being “somewhere else”. We joined the foreign service in 2001 and while training in Washington D.C. I took a course in darkroom technique and my second love was born.  While living in South Africa for a couple of years, I bought my first digital camera.

With no formal training until returning to Madison in 2013 I adopted trial and error as my teacher. Here I have been lucky to have patient teachers to push me.

I think two things, at least, are part of travelling with your camera always available.  Of Course you record cultures. As Edward Haas says “….you record tradition and change, to make certain that ..you keep the past from slipping away”.  You are recording the footprints of history. At the same time, you move slowly and notice the colors, shapes, and light that interest you as a photographer irrespective of place.  I love the little things, the stone work, the kids in the street, and the night life. The human interactions are a huge bonus.

The images here are my first work with full color.  I have always liked subtlety and have desaturated almost all of my color images.  Here I am experimenting with full color and am enjoying a new path.

Robin Downs: In September of this year I travelled with a few other photographers and a local guide to the hill country of northern Vietnam. We hoped to experience and photograph the many minority groups of northern Vietnam in their homes, fields and markets. The trip was timed for the peak of the rice harvest, when the terraces turn bright yellow with ripe rice, and the people are in the fields. We nailed it! 

My interest is in capturing images of people in their everyday environment, doing the things we all do, however uniquely due to cultural differences. We all go to market but driving a scooter home with two live hens dangling from the handlebars stands in contrast to the neatly butchered and plastic wrapped way we Americans do business. Or the boys crowding around the fighting cocks for sale, there is something familiar about that.

The more I travel the more I appreciate how similar we all are. Family, work, enjoying friends are important everywhere. I enjoy highlighting those similarities and I hope you will enjoy viewing them.