Beginning November 1st and running through January 7th the Seaside Public Library will be exhibiting original photography prints by Chris Villiers. The show is titled, “Around the Next Bend : Two Cameras in Conversation” and will  be presented in the Library foyer and Community Room.   

Flashing by at sixty miles per hour. Sometimes in pairs, sometimes in triplets. Some with inscriptions, most not. Memories and memorials. Worn and weathered. Each with its own story to tell yet reluctant to share with anyone who hasn’t already heard. Often surrounded with deeply personal items, arranged like offerings in a temple – a favorite photograph, a collection of toy cars, packs of cigarettes and bottles of beer, an old baseball cap, an action figure, an American flag.

Three years ago, Chris Villiers moved from the Seattle area to the remote coast of Oregon. Several times each month, he would drive up and back to visit his daughter, meet friends or conduct business. During those same three years, both his father and my father-in-law passed away, prompting even more one-hundred-and-eighty-one-mile car trips each way. Each time he drove those back roads, he noticed another memorial he overlooked before.

This series of traditional darkroom prints was created using two very different film cameras – a medium-format Bronica SQ with tack-sharp optics, and a Zodiac toy camera with a scratched plastic lens that darkens the edges of each frame and keeps the subject blurred and slightly out-of-focus, much like our view of what waits for us around the next bend.