Barnard Firehouse photo exhibit shines infrared-hot

Jeremy Barnard remembers the bad old days of infrared photography, back in the days of film and chemicals. He remembers them well, the bad old days, remembers them as ... well, kind of like golf. Not because the work was mind-numbingly boring, like the so-called sport is for most, if not all, sentient beings, or because you are required to wear silly-looking clothes, but because of the way the game, and the style of photography, just takes it out of you — challenging you, taunting you, all but daring you to throw your clubs — or your camera — into the lake. Where they belong. Like most golfers, if you were working the infrared part of the light spectrum before the dawn of the digital age, you "stunk most of the time," says Barnard. Not for lack of talent or for an inability to keep your eye on the ball, but because the technology itself was, back then, unpredictable — and flawed.  "It drives you out of your mind, but then, just as you're about to quit, after all that frustration and disappointment, you get something that's decent and, masochist that you are, you think, 'OK, I'll suffer with this a little longer.'"  He eventually drifted away from infrared, but got back into the game when technology caught up with the format, with digital photography eliminating most of the headaches. When it came time to upgrade his equipment about three years ago, he replaced the low-pass filter in his digital SLR with a permanent infrared filter. Why? “Because something about infrared that speaks to me,” he says. The approach has an eerie effect in black-and-white photography, giving viewers blistering, eye-popping detail, sometimes on a surreal canvas, with leaves transformed plume-like on silvered branches and tree trunks. Or, as Barnard puts it, the images are like "an X-ray peering into the innermost life of Mother Nature ... allowing us to see more than we would with our naked eye." All of which you can see in "Beyond Our Vision," Barnard's new exhibit of infrared photography at the Firehouse. 

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Now here's an exhibit to get jazzed about

Once upon a time — and, relatively speaking, it wasn't  that long ago, just 50, maybe 60 years ago — the lower-case gods walked among us. Jazz gods, a pantheon of now-legendary players  like Armstrong, Parker, Gillespie, then just working stiffs. Not only walking among us, but also playing across the street from each other. Not just a street, of course, but The Street: 52nd, between 5th and 6th, in a confluence of clubs, unrivaled anywhere, except, arguably, New Orleans. You just never knew who would walk through the door and take the stage. A case in point: 1947. Dizzy Gillespie was playing Three Deuces with his new band, which included Milt Jackson and the core of what would become the Modern Jazz Quartet, then in walked Ella Fitzgerald. She wasn't working. No, the Queen of Song was there to see bassist Ray Brown, her fiance. Gillespie cajoled her onto the stage, and William P. Gottlieb, the writer/photographer who documented the scene for the Washington Post first, and, later, DownBeat,, moved into position. But this was not the shot he wanted. He wanted Gillespie in the frame. According to Gottlieb, he made a gesture with his shoulder and Gillespie, one of his favorite subjects over the years — and a guy who did not mind mugging for the camera — knew what needed to be done. He swooped into frame and assumed an angelic expression — "making like a fawn in the background," is how the photographer described it during an interview with the Library of Congress, which acquired the collection in 1995. 

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