Andrea Dana Polk became enthralled with photography as an adolescent. She comes from a family of artists: her mother is a portrait painter, her father is a writer, musician, and sculptor. Her sister, a former Washington Post editor, is a fabric artist and early member of the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, Virginia, the Nation’s first publicly funded Arts Collective. While attending Georgetown University, Andrea began working in color darkrooms after taking photography classes: those experiences inspired her particular interest in vivid, manipulated color, and “painterly”, abstract photography images.
Employing a minimum of five photo editing applications, each image is produced as a time-consuming labor of love.
Drawn to such disparate subjects as old cars and motorcycles, atmospheric city streets, and scenes from nature, her travels through the United States, Canada, Central America, Northern Africa, England, Ireland, Japan, Western and Eastern Europe, and the Middle East) and her desire to craft representative images was guided by the essential principle that “in photography, light is the magician”. Although the darkroom may be a thing of the past for Andrea and most photographers, the advent of digital technology has vastly expanded the art, bringing new creativity to the medium and making it accessible to an astonishing number of people around the world.
One of Andrea’s favorite images, taken in Sharm El Sheikh, depicts a fully veiled Saudi Arabian woman, with holding an iPhone in one hand and a “state of the art” Nikon in the other. The photographic community is a generously collaborative one, utilizing technology and social media to share creative innovations and to inspire one another. Since the first photographic image was printed in 1826, there has been an ongoing debate over photography’s legitimacy as an art form. If an image is altered, for example, does that devalue its artistic merit? Yet whether in the darkroom or with digital tools, photographers have always layered their pictures with artistic interpretation.
Edward Steichen, among the most influential of the early photographers, created ethereal images at the turn of the 20th century which blurred the line between painting and photography. Called Pictorialism, Steichen’s belief was that altering a photograph was no different than choosing when and where to click the shutter. He maintained that photographers always have a perspective that “necessarily distorts the authenticity of their image”. Steichen’s influence can be seen in every photographer who seeks to create scenes, not merely capture them.
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