Continuing to catch up on MKE Creatives posts from this Fall…
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The October MKE Creatives meetup featured a visit from local large-format photographer, Cherie Morfe. Trends in the photography world are all digital these days, but Cherie has embraced a thoughtful, “slow” approach to photography. She works with a classic bellows-type camera – where you see the photographer put a sheet over their head to focus the image directly on their ground-glass. Cherie works in black-and-white, and in recent years has had her work appearing in more and more juried shows! She is a member of the Cedarburg Artists Guild and came to share her images and story with us at Anodyne Coffee.
Cherie’s life has been a bit of a zig-zag route. She grew up in Michigan, went to law school in Louisiana, moved to the United Kingdom, eventually ended up out New England…and now is in the Cedarburg area! Growing up, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, and so accepted her father’s push to go to law school. She did complete law school, but once working as a lawyer, just did not find it that satisfying.
Eventually she took a photography workshop at the New England School of Photography and something clicked for her. While she’s now been shooting film for about 14 years, she hasn’t gone to school to learn her craft, but has taken many workshops. At the New England school, they pushed her to do more and there she learned about the Zone System. She worked in 35mm, then medium format, and then large format! She got a Calumet Cadet and was hooked.
She says of her creative life…”My husband is probably my biggest fan, my biggest supporter”…”I’m that person who spends 10 minutes in the produce section, choosing just the right pear or head of lettuce”…”I want to make folks stop and appreciate things that we might overlook.”
Cherie finds a lot of fulfillment in exhibiting her work, “”most of the joy comes in showing; if I sell a print, that’s great, but it’s mainly about the showing.” This year has seen her work in multiple group shows, including at the MSOE Grohmann Museum.
This Fall, her photography took another “slow” turn with her introduction to platinum printing, an alternative process for making photo-prints. Cherie went out to New Hampshire to take a 3-day workshop on this technique. So, while most of us are working digitally, Cherie, working with her large format camera, is now working in a process that requires her to make her negatives, then enlarge those negatives, then coat her own paper with a light-sensitive emulsion, and then contact print that enlarged negative. It’s quite the process! She says though, “The tonal range is just a bit different from a traditional print and I just fell in love with the process!”
(if you’d like to learn traditional wet darkroom printing, shoot me an email! I lead a “guided darkroom” up at Cardinal Stritch University, and it meets quite regularly on Wednesday evenings)
