Quick Take
Pixel Printers of Santa Cruz represent eight fine-art local photographers all focused on emphasizing the power of the image as printed on paper. The Pixels' new group show opens Friday at the R. Blitzer Gallery.
Everyone these days has a camera in their pocket — and, in most cases, a pretty darn good one, too. It stands to reason then, that, so armed by technological innovation, everyone might begin to believe that they are photographers.
But, however much cellphone technology has (choose your verb here) democratized or cheapened photography, many photographers are still devoted to the craft as it originally developed in the 19th century — capturing a compelling image and putting it on paper.
One such group is Pixel Printers of Santa Cruz, a collective of eight artists from Santa Cruz County who are the subject of a bracing new art show at the R. Blitzer Gallery in February called “Through Our Eyes.”
Notice that these folks don’t call themselves the Pixel Photographers of Santa Cruz, but the Pixel Printers of Santa Cruz. That’s because they believe in the sanctity of the photo on paper and recognize the artistry and technological know-how that it takes to get it there. It also marks them a bit as rebels in this screens-are-everything world. For most of us, perhaps, the difference between a great photo on an iPad and on a piece of photo paper hanging on the wall is negligible. For the Pixels, it’s crucial. To them, prints reveal textures, patterns, even colors that photos on a backlit computer screen can’t quite capture.
“I think digital photography today is mostly structured around the screen, cellphones or desktop screens,” said Kevin Osborn, one of the eight Pixel artists. “Our focus is on the printed image. Really the idea is to go beyond the screen and get to something physical. We feel that the physical print is the ultimate expression of the work.”
The eight — Osborn, Kathy Edwards, Keith Munger, Michael Singer, Annelies de Kater, Mark Overgaard, Robert Mahrer and Larry Herzberg — come together once a month, as a kind of salon, to share ideas and techniques and to critique each other’s work. They come from a variety of backgrounds, and each has a unique set of interests and obsessions when it comes to the themes of their work. One is focused on ice crystals in nature in the Arctic and Antarctica. Another looks for Escher-esque imagery in the commonplace built environment. Another is in search of aesthetically intriguing images in the post-CZU landscape of Big Basin Redwoods State Park. What they have in common is a deep respect for the power of photography to help see in deeper ways and an ethic that puts printing on paper at the center of the creative process.
“We all do a lot of computer post-processing of our images,” said Michael Singer, “but we’re not really computer artists. There’s a lot of us landscapes and portraits and abstracts. It’s all over the board, really. And that’s the nice thing about the group: We’re all complementary to each other. There’s not a whole lot of overlap.”
Gallery: Photographs of the Pixel Printers
Keith Munger’s photographic eye zeroes in details in the natural world that highlight color and form in a painterly way. Credit: Keith Munger 
Photographer Robert Mahrer travels across California looking for how light and weather conditions change views of traditional landscapes. Credit: Robert Mahrer 
Kevin Osborn of the Pixel Printers of Santa Cruz follows his curiosities shooting kelp in infrared light. Credit: Kevin Osborn 
Larry Herzberg spent time in Big Basin Redwoods State Park after the crippling CZU fires to hunt for beauty in the haunting images left behind. Credit: Larry Herzberg 
Mark Overgaard’s work throws attention to the forms and colors of the world’s polar regions, with an emphasis on finding patterns within what he calls “frozen crystalscapes.” Credit: Mark Overgaard 
Michael Singer leans into abstractions often found in the built, human world, often with manipulated images to create scenes of geometric complexity. Credit: Michael Singer 
Kathy Edwards creates swirls of color and flow in natural and marine imagery, such as marine life in an aquarium. Credit: Kathy Edwards 
Annelies de Kater’s photography zooms in on small-scale abstract images found in nature, such as within rock formations. Credit: Annelies de Kater
The group is an offshoot of a larger network of local photographers known as the community of digital artists, many of whom studied photography under Cabrillo College photographer and artist Ted Orland. Emerging from the pandemic, a handful of those photographers decided to form a splinter group, to allow them to explore each other’s work more deeply.
“We limit the group to eight people,” said Osborn. “Any more than eight and we wouldn’t be able to give everyone’s work the attention it deserves.”
The Pixel Printers have already done one group show — in Half Moon Bay last fall. The Blitzer show, “Through Our Eyes,” will be an expanded version of the Half Moon Bay show, and marks the public debut of the group in the community where they all live.
“We’ve essentially doubled the size of the show,” said Osborn. “It’s a more complete expression of our work.”
Osborn is representative of the Pixels in that he shares the group’s general orientation to photography, but he also has his idiosyncratic interests. In his case, it has to do with infrared photography, capturing the range of color beyond the spectrum of human sight. Osborn’s recent focus has been infrared imagery of kelp along the beaches and shorelines of Santa Cruz. Infrared photos give the viewer a different sense of light and color, especially of natural and plant images. Infrared light often inverts colors and values. Trees and other plant life, for instance, look white, adding a ghostly surreal vibe to an otherwise mundane scene.
Osborn, who comes from a tech engineering background, began shooting with an infrared filter — which blocks all visible light, leaving only infrared light — on his camera “just to see what the world looks like in infrared. And I got a lot of photos of trees. I mean, I was tempted to do a tree exhibit [with the new Blitzer show]. But instead, I thought that the kelp was maybe something people hadn’t seen before. I hope that people will look at it, and say ‘What is that?’”
Bob Mahrer, the most recent member of the Pixel Printers, is a longtime surfer who, as a photographer, is pursuing a project he calls “Essential California.” It’s an effort, he said, to capture the majesty and mystique of different sites in California in different lighting conditions. He’s particularly taken with Death Valley and the Southern California deserts, as well as the Eastern Sierra.
“I just fell in love with it,” said Maurer of artistic landscape photography. “My surfing buddies couldn’t understand it. They’d call me about a swell or something, and I’d say, ‘I’m in Death Valley.’”
Annelies de Kater is instead focusing on the minute, finding abstract patterns within natural settings, like plant life or rock formations. De Kater is a pathologist by profession, and she said there is quite an overlap between the sciences and abstract photography.
“Photography is an artform that appeals to a lot of scientists,” she said, “because there are often a lot of detailed technical aspects of them.”
Michael Singer is also focused on abstractions, but his work often comes from the built or human-made world. “I’ll take an image and duplicate it and flip it or rotate it, trying to come up with some interpretation of something people have seen a bunch of times but are looking at it in a new way.”
“Through Our Eyes” from the Pixel Printers of Santa Cruz opens Friday, Jan. 26, at the R. Blitzer Gallery in the former Wrigley building on the Westside of Santa Cruz. The opening reception is Friday from 5 to 8 p.m. That’s followed by a First Friday reception Feb. 2 from 5 to 8 p.m.
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