Between Frames - April 2024
Welcome back!
It’s the end of April, which means that it’s the end of the first official month of Between Frames! First off, I am so grateful for the response that this has gotten! You all have blown me away 🫶!
It’s unfortunate that this month is the first full month of Between Frames. I took a few weeks off of work this month to deal with some personal matters; therefore, the length of the Work section might not be what it usually would look like.
In this newsletter, you’ll see the start of a short-term project that I am working on. I travelled to Laurinburg, NC this month to work through my father’s death. On this 36-hour trip, I tried to create a body of work documenting the area that I lived in. Beyond this, I continued some longer-term projects that I am working on, telling the stories of Lynchburg, VA.
Thanks again for reading, it means more than you can ever know!
Until next time.
-Chase
Documentary & Film
As mentioned in the intro, I started work on a body of work that honors my time in Laurinburg, NC (really Wagram, NC, but it’s so small, it hardly counts lol) . Laurinburg is a town that experiences a lot of hurt. There’s immense beauty there and it’s in a period of growth and revival, but it’s far from being free of the pain, the loss, or the death.
These few sentences perfectly summarize the goal of this project, to create beauty with the ashes that have been left during the destruction that Laurinburg & its people face. This first frame comes from an abandoned grocer near my childhood home. The warm late-afternoon light splashing over the building, mixed with the flowers growing in the front, provided me with a beautiful frame despite the hurt of a failed business.
Wagram was infiltrated by internet gambling parlors about a decade ago. Just starting to recover from the hold that traditional casinos and gambling parlors had on the town, this brought back much of the pain from before. Many of these parlors have since been shut down due to strict government regulation; however, their empty storefronts still litter the town’s landscape.
Much of Wagram sits close to the Lumber River, and much of this river is protected land in the form of a State Park. The Lumber River brings with it a lot of flora and fauna that aren’t seen in the rest of the county, including the cypress tree in the image to the right. The entire rest of the county is filled with sand (it’s in the Sandhills after all), pine trees, and pine needles galore. These rare cypress trees bring a splash of originality to an otherwise un-original ecosystem.
To see more images from past-projects, check out the link below!
Landscapes
Many of the frames that I shot in Laurinburg/Wagram could fall into this category; they were often void of people in them. I wanted to highlight a few different frames here though. First up, a cityscape from a trip that Paloma (my amazing wife) & I took to NYC in early April.
New York City is a place that I struggle to shoot in. It’s either documentary or portraits, hardly landscapes. This frame is one I love due to all of the textures in it, while also being so simple. There’s not much too it, other than the fact that I am proud of it and grateful to be able to be growing in my ability to document NYC well.
To change gears for a bit, I’ve been working on a larger project to highlight the little, often overlooked details of Lynchburg, VA, specifically in the Rivermont area. It’s been slow going and something were I haven’t found much “success” (whatever that may be). The next two images are from this project; they’re not much, but they highlight details of the area that might not be the first things you see. The late evening light in the left frame and the early morning light in the right frame, mixed with the lack of people in these frames, help to strip away anything distracting and really focus the compositions onto the details.
Maybe I’m rambling and thinking too much, but I really do love the scenes and details of Rivermont.
If you want to see more of what I have created in my landscape photography journey, click this link and it will take you to my Landscapes portfolio.
Portraits
This month’s portraits come in two avenues: street portraits from NYC and intentional portraits of our friends in Lynchburg. It’s such a contrast between photographing people, without them really being aware of the camera, on one hand and photographing close friends who are letting their walls down in front of the camera.
I chose frames for my Portraits section, even though they don’t show people intentionally standing in front of the camera, because they tell stories of specific people in front of the camera. The left frame shows a couple leaving Penn Station in NYC, on their way to the Yankees home opener. It’s rushed and blurry, yet shows love, both for one another and for the pinstriped Yanks. The right frame shows a Korean lady evangelizing about Christian Korean ministries on a street corner. She had a bullhorn and some of her co-evangelists had shofars (big ‘ole ram horns). Suffice to say, they were quite loud. Around her, you see people moving all around, practically avoiding her. I wonder if this is what Jesus wanted us to do to share His Gospel.
If you want to see more of the frames that I make of the people around me, check out the link below to go to my Portraits portfolio.
Copyright (C) 2024 Chase M. O. Gyles. All rights reserved.
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