Document text
Local talent brings work home Photographer opens show at Rogue Gallery By BILL VARBLE Doremus Scudder's photograph "Dead Juniper and Canyon" seems to reach out across a room and suck you in. Seen close up, a dead bush in the foreground is rich in detail, but so are the buttes and canyons marching off into the deep background. Scudder gets those images with black and white film using large-format view cameras. As a youngster, the Phoenix native began in photography with a 35-millimeter single-lens reflex camera, but he read about large-format cameras and thought they might give him the beautiful images he was looking for. "I'm one of these nerds that reads about everything," he says. Many years later he hasn't changed his mind. An exhibit of Scudder's photography that opens today at the Rogue Gallery and Art Center testifies to that. Called "At Home and Abroad, Photographs from Two Continents," the show brings together more than 50 black-and-white landscape, still-life and architecture photos. A reception is planned for 5 to 7 p.m. Friday at the gallery, 40 S. Bartlett St., Medford. It's probably safe to say that Doremus Scudder is the only opera-singing professional photographer in Vienna, Austria, who hails from Phoenix, Ore. Scudder grew up in the Rogue Valley and went to Phoenix High School and then-Southern Oregon State College. After earning a degree in music in 1981, he did brief stints as a piano teacher, radio announcer, TV cameraman and commercial photographer. He was active in the Rogue Valley Chorale, the Southern Oregon Repertory Singers, the Ashland City Band, the Rogue Valley Symphony and the Rogue Opera. He studied voice at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His wife, Marie Landreth, who taught at Southern Oregon State College, went to Austria to study at the Vienna Academy of Music. "Hey, you're as good as these guys," she told Scudder. He joined her, and a decade later, they're still there, directing a musical series in Vienna called "Imperial Concerts," a 10-month event for which they pick the music, hire the musicians and perform. "We don't sell the tickets," he says with a laugh. The Scudders also operate a small company that does English translations and technical English instruction for banks and oil companies and the like. When he's not performing or translating, Scudder continues his photography. He says he learned the basics from his father and got serious about it in his 20s. His first view camera was a used Graphic View, which uses a negative many times the size of the typical camera. The camera also permits the photographer a lot of flexibility in controlling the perspective. Shooting with a tripod, a photographer can stop his aperture, or the opening that lets the light in, way down and use very slow shutter speeds, getting great depth of field. Scudder is also a "straight photography" buff who believes in presenting the subject as it's seen when the image is composed, without manipulating the image in the darkroom. He makes hand-crafted silver prints and mounts and frames them using cotton rag board. His photos have been collected in the United States and Europe. The photos in this exhibit sell for about $425 here. He says they bring more in Europe. He says it was his father who instilled in him a love of photos. "Education today fills you full of facts," he says. "My father taught me how to think." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1998, Medford, Oregon USA