Local photographer Jerre Paquette brings a Van Gogh-like impressionist style to nature photography.
Paquette first developed an interest in photography by experimenting with his father’s camera when he was young, but it was later, as a way of coping with the loss of his son that he developed his unique style.
“I was bitter and angry with the world. I started to use photography as a way of finding beauty in ugly places because I was in an ugly place myself,” Paquette said.
He describes how by shooting in ditches and dumps he began seeing subject matter worthy of a photograph everywhere he went. Paquette relates the story behind a photo of an orange hibiscus flower that hangs on the wall of his house.
The photo was from a trip to Hawaii Paquette took. Although the flower in the photo looks beautiful, tropical and framed by the sun, Paquette said that it was in a planter in a strip-mall.
Interested by the way the light caught the edges of the flower, Paquette climbed into the planter and began taking photos. Before long a passing police officer came to ask him what he was doing. The officer didn’t believe that Paquette was photographing such an ordinary looking plant.
“I told him to climb in here and find something beautiful,” Paquette said. After some playing with the camera, the policeman was surprised by the way he was able to make the flower look.
Paquette says the goal of his photography is to make people feel more deeply about the small things in their own world.
“I can sit in my backyard and find things to shoot,” Paquette said, “When you’re looking through the lens of a camera you see things you wouldn’t normally see.”
Paquette said his past working in education at various levels, particularly as a film history professor, shaped his photography.
“What you teach people when you teach cinema is how to look and how to hear,” he said.
The use of distortion and the blurring of hard edges using Photoshop tools on the computer sets Paquette’s photography apart from many others.
He says the goal of this technique is to recreate the emotions he felt while taking the photo, rather than simply creating a snapshot.
“Distortion is the most powerful thing for me,” Paquette said.
Examples of Paquette’s photographs will be on display at the Podollan Inn on the Trans-Canada Highway in Salmon Arm throughout the summer. His work will also be shown at the Reedman Gallery in Cedar Heights Aug. 13 to Sept. 5.