Special to The Bedford Citizen
An exhibit of photographs by Bob Bass, a founding director of the BCA Photography Group, continues in the Gallery @ First Parish in the historic meetinghouse on Bedford Common. The gallery is on the second floor, and the building is fully accessible using its Elm Street entrance.
Bass’s exhibit is supported in part by a grant from the Bedford Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.
Dorothea Lange, an American documentary photographer of the depression era, said, “a camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” Bass’s solo exhibit shows how his camera has changed the way he sees the world around him.
In four different spaces of the gallery, images that he has captured, post-processed, printed, and framed will include four different bodies of work created since his retirement about 6 years ago. Each of the subject areas demonstrates a different relationship with his subjects: “A distant perspective of long-exposure black and white images of surf in Martha’s Vineyard,” said Bass. “Close-up portraits of individuals just being themselves (also black and white); as an observer of people at decisive moments interacting with each other; and as an observer of commonplace scenes that hinge on the balance between abstract and known objects.”
About the Photographer ~ Bob Bass
Bass grew up in the 1950s in a small southern town where he began taking pictures with a Kodak “Brownie” camera, ordered from the Sears & Roebuck catalog. His post-secondary education with a major in psychology began at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) and culminated with a Ph.D. from Brown University.
After teaching in Columbus, Ohio for several years, Bass returned to New England and worked for 24 years at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Center, now a program of the UMass Medical School. While there, he served as a consultant to families with children with developmental disabilities and founded the New England INDEX, a state-wide information network that took advantage of emerging Internet technology to provide an up-to-date source of information about disability-related services.
After moving to Bedford in 2002, Bass became active in the Bedford Center for the Arts (BCA) and around 2010, became a member of the board of directors. About the same time, with the encouragement of fellow board member Julie McCay Turner and several Bedford photographers, the group founded what has become the BCA Photo Group – click this link to learn more about the Photo Group. Bass served as Director from 2014 to 2016, following terms by Marv Goldschmitt and Bill Davison.
Bass has exhibited his photographs in juried shows at Concord Art and the Umbrella Community Arts Center in Concord; the Bedford Free Public Library; Grace Chapel in Lexington; Gallery Seven in Maynard; as well as in shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography and the Bedford Arts & Crafts Society. He has studied under several leading photographers/artists including Steve Dunwell, Tim Grey, Michael Milicia, Thibault Roland, Alison Shaw, and Harvey Stein.
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