Ann Peterson's moving camera technique.

Moving Pictures

Ann Peterson’s photographs on view at the Neighborhood Collective consist of pleasant and often strikingly beautiful views of the sort of we might hope to happen upon on a vacation trip, but might fail to notice until the camera—and the photographer behind the camera—views them first and points them out to us.

The photos are from trips to England, Ireland, Scotland, and Mexico, and around Western New York, and they depict such things as boats in harbors, vernacular architecture of the several countries visited, and countryside views of cows or goats grazing on hillsides. And such colors and textures.

As in a photo from Mexico of a weathered wood double doorway beneath a handsome painted purple archway, against a green wall, behind an iron trellis railing. Or from Ireland, a window in a brick and stone house, the window frame peeling paint, but the glass polished clean and bright, and behind the window starchy clean lace curtains.

Or in a photo of a group of empty painted garden chairs in Easter egg pastels amid unruly tufts of reedy grass.

The body of work has an overall serendipitous air. Of happy accident in the chance discovery of so many and such lovely visual vignettes. Such as when four goats grazing on a hillside line up almost as if in military formation.

But overall serendipitous to the point of raising a question about manipulation. But the photographer said the photos are not manipulated. Nothing is Photoshopped.

A few of the photos are taken using a moving camera technique. Either from a moving car window, or just by moving the camera at the snapshot moment.

(A personal note: Most of the snapshots I’ve ever taken have employed this technique. I’d never thought of it before as an artistic practice.)

The results of the moving camera photos are mixed. The best of them turns a cluster of saplings into an impromptu forest dance of wraithlike forms.

The exhibit is called Return to Light and continues through November 16.

—jack foran