Antarctica, the white continent, is the harshest, coldest, windiest, driest, most mountainous place on earth…
Huntington, N.Y. – Fotofoto gallery member and Kodak professional partner, Holly Gordon brings her Antarctica odyssey home with photographs that will dazzle your senses with their chilling fragility and beauty.
Antarctica: Journey to the Extreme is a body of images on many levels. From the aesthetic standpoint, it is a visual choreography between artist and light. Scientifically, it is a documentation of the beauty and fragility of our planet… but it is much more than geographical documentary imagery. It is portraiture, close-up encounters with icebergs, as well as the jaunty penguins that inhabit the region.
Environmentally, this exhibition conveys the serious implications of global warming. It is ecologically relevant, and on every level, it is an intimate and personal encounter with nature in its purest form. It is the kind of exhibition that people can identify with. It is a must-see, and you can do it without crossing the Convergence or the Drake Passage.
Holly Gordon is a working photographer coming from a fine arts background, and holds a Master’s Degree from New York University. She is a member of Fotofoto Gallery and BJSpoke Gallery in Huntington, as well as Huntington Arts Council. Exhibited widely, including the American Museum of Natural History in NYC and Denise Bibro Fine Art in Chelsea, Manhattan, her work has also appeared in published form in Shutterbug Magazine, National Wildlife Magazine, New York Newsday and dozens of other media channels. Kodak showcases her work on their professional site. Holly has two museum-quality traveling exhibits, Antarctica: Journey to the Extreme and Galapagos: Face to Face, in circulation and is creating a new exhibit covering a recent journey through China. Her photography plants ‘seeds’ to grow more environmentally sensitive and educated people of all ages. Once a teacher, she is still teaching. Nature is her studio and the world is her classroom.
“Gordon likes to say that she speaks for nature and she does so in a very eloquent way.”
Joe Farace, January 2006 Shutterbug
additional information and image files provided upon request
Background Information on Exhibition
It’s cool…it’s big…and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Environmental and fine art photographer Holly Gordon wanted to be in an extreme location when 1999 became 2000…so she set sail for Antarctica with lots of Kodak film to meet the challenges of unpredictability. Luminescent Kodak Metallic paper was selected to capture the chilling and fragile beauty of the voyage for her exhibition. Today Holly, member of FotoFoto Gallery, is a Kodak partner and her photography is showcased on the Kodak professional site.
The quest for Antarctica began when Holly was seven years old. She hadn’t even heard the names of Shackleton and Scott but the bottom edge of the map in her second grade classroom held a fascination. She imagined mysterious Antarctica to be dark and barren and as far away from home as she could possibly venture without leaving planet Earth…and wanted to experience it.
She got the distance right. Holly Gordon grew up to live her dream. When 1999 became 2000 she set sail for the Antarctic Peninsula by way of Easter Island…but that’s another story and another exhibition…and discovered that the temperature was milder and the air was brighter than anything she had ever dreamed as a child or witnessed as an adult in all her travels.
If the saying one picture is worth a thousand words holds true, imagine what her forty images reveal! This exhibition, Antarctica: Journey to the Extreme, captures the vastness, the pristine beauty, the clarity, the many shades of blues and whites as well and the three species of penguin that inhabit the region. Most people will never even think of going there…and Holly is ready to return.
Antarctica: Journey to the Extreme opens April 9th at FotoFoto Gallery, 372 New York Avenue, Huntington, NY and runs through May 16, 2010. The opening reception is April 10th from 5-7pm and a gallery talk will be scheduled. Please check with the gallery. This is a must see exhibit several times over!
Internationally exhibited and published, Holly Gordon also exhibits locally. In addition to membership at FotoFoto in the Huntington area, she is a member of BJ Spoke Gallery and the Huntington Arts Council.
Antarctica: Journey to the Extreme is a photography exhibition on many levels. From the aesthetic standpoint it is a visual choreography between artist and light. Scientifically, it is a documentation of the beauty and fragility of our planet…but it is much more than geographical record shots. It is portraiture, close up encounters with icebergs as well as the jaunty penguins that inhabit the region.
Environmentally, this exhibition conveys the seriousness implications of global warming. It is ecologically relevant. On every level it is an intimate and personal encounter with nature at its most pure. It is the kind of exhibition that people can identify with.
More than ninety percent of the world’s glacial ice is in Antarctica and it is melting at an alarming rate. Global warming is a real threat and we do not see it or really comprehend its seriousness because Antarctica is so far beyond our daily sphere of living. This exhibition brings Antarctica home. Most people will never cross the convergence or the Drake Passage yet the preservation of this remote region impacts on the ecological well-being of the entire world. Come to FotoFoto Gallery to see this exhibit. Visit Antarctica without crossing the Drake Passage!
In April 2013 this tulip of mine was the cover of 
Early in my photography days I searched for perfect blooms that were surrounded by complementary backgrounds because I want my images to be visually whole. The positive and negative space must fit like a visual glove.
Tulips have been part of my life and focus even before I realized that their colorful and varied displays looked like dabs of paint!
My first morning in Monet’s glorious Giverny garden was cold and rainy and windy. The blooms were bedraggled and not at all as I had dreamed it would be. I wanted to cry and then rethought the situation locating a cluster of red tulips surrounded by yellow and green. I then photographed to capture the movement and the merging of color. I ultimately created this image by layering a series I took that first morning in Monet’s Garden. Little did Iknow that this experimentation would contribute to my current creative process, Photo-Liminalism. 
And it was the tulip that cemented the Facebook connection to Ward Hooper that led to meeting face-to-face and begin a collaboration that has led to our book Parallel Perspective:The Brush/Lens Collaboration
One of the discoveries I made in Monet’s garden, Giverny, was that there is powerful beauty in decay. Up untill now I had searched for perfection to photograph…but now I was expanding the sensitivity of my vision to see beauty in blooms past their prime.
The nighttime temperature must have dipped after a rain and caused these tulips to become semi-translucent opalescence. Whatever it was that happened to them created an unusual appearance that was beautiful and seductively voluptuous. I deliberately photographed this image out-of focus to soften the tonality. I named it Odalisque for its sensual qualities. When my patron first saw it he immediately responded with this passage of Baudelaire’s Triesses de la Lune, Sorrows of the Moon from Les Fleur du Mal Tr. Richard Howard:
And here is Le Danseur. I know I had French on my brain but don’t you think she looks like a dancer with her arms, gracefully outstretched and her skirt flowing…
These two images are my Chiaroscuro tulips—light out of darkness. The background of the lawn was far enough away form the light of the tulips to render a nearly black background
Photographing M’Illumino was a pivotal moment in my creative life. Like Monet I am an avid gardener and painter….only the camera is my paintbrush and the viewfinder my canvas
Monet said to look beyond the bloom and I do a lot of that now. These are some of my creations:
The Galapagos Islands are living proof of Nature’s endurance, despite natural harshness and man’s destruction. Giant tortoises, enormous symbol of survival, traverse their annual migration route…a journey they have made for millions of years in the Galapagos.