Rarefied light

Frontiersman

WASILLA — The digital age finally caught up with Jodi Swanson.

It wasn’t easy leaving the darkroom where images magically appear on sheets like ghosts swimming in a tray of chemicals.

Now Swanson can see a photograph she’s made immediately after the camera’s shutter closes.

The old ways -— darkroom equipment, film cameras and all that — collect dust in the crawl space of her Wasilla home. She roams the Valley now armed with her Canon Rebel XT, enjoying the outdoors with her two 9-year-old Lab mixes, Molly and Nuna.

Two years after joining the digital world, the switch from film seems to agree with her.

She has two images hanging at the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center where they are part of the prestigious “Rarefied Light” show that draws top photographers from throughout the state.

Swanson said she tends to make photographs in an outdoors setting, but doesn’t consider herself a nature photographer. Nor does she try to capture the color of her topics.

“Black and white seems to be the thing,” Swanson said. “I just see it. I don’t know how to explain it.”

The two images in the show, about 11 by14 inches, are titled “Puffballs” and “Swirling Ice.”

She said the old puffballs reminded her of martini olives or eyes.

Because digital images first appear in color, Swanson, who works at the convention centers in Anchorage, has to manipulate them into the black and white she prefers.

“That’s what women do, right?” she said, laughing, over the phone Wednesday afternoon.

She just finished a semester at UAA on PhotoShop, a computer image program.

“I had to get a Mac computer,” she said. “It was my first computer. I’m a little behind the times, but I do have a remote for the TV.”

Television, for the most part, has gone by the wayside, she said. It took up too much of her time. Now, she worries she spends too much time on the computer, though most of that is working with her images.

“Time gets away,” she said, but she tries to spend at least one day a week working on her craft.

This year’s juror was David Hilliard, a photographer and assistant professor at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. According to Rarefied’s Web site, he has won numerous grants and awards, including Fulbright and Guggenheim grants.

Hilliard chose “Swirling Ice” as an honorable mention from more than 350 pieces entered by some 70 Alaska photographers. Swanson said only 69 images made it in the show from 46 photographers. Since this was the first time she has entered, the 40-year-old felt pretty good about her start as a digital artist.

Asked about how she got her start, she rolled her eyes, “I come from an artistic family. My father is a writer and did color work for the ‘Far Side’ for years,” referring to Gary Larson’s popular and often bizarre cartoons.

“Now my 7-year-old niece has the gift,” she said laughing, and wondering if it isn’t a burden instead.

The photographic part of her gift began at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas, near her home town of Kansas City. It was a professor there that she’s kept up with who finally convinced her to sniff the winds of change and ditch the film world. After community college, she was off to the Art Institute of Chicago and finished at Columbia College Chicago, which touts itself as the largest private arts and media college in the nation.

Now, far from the crowded streets of Chicago’s Loop District, Swanson often spends that one day of work on her art, hiking the Crevasse-Moraine Trail near Palmer with a camera in her hand and Molly and Nuna romping nearby.

Contact T.C. Mitchell at valleylife@frontiersman.com or 352-2269

If you go

• Jodi Swanson will have a show the second week in December at Campobello Bistro, 601 W 36th Ave., Anchorage.

• “Rarefied Light”

Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center

121 West 7th Ave.

Runs through Dec. 28

• After its run in Anchorage, the exhibit travels to Kenai Peninsula College Jan. 9 to Feb. 4, and to Cordova Historical Museum Feb. 20 to March 20.