Candela Books + Gallery is proud to present Continuum, a selection of photographs by celebrated photographer Linda Connor. The exhibition includes original contact prints, as well as recent digital prints on paper and silk, from her haunting 2008 monograph, Odyssey. Using a large-format 8 x 10 view camera, Connor has captured an array of sacred iconography, religious sites and related cultural events that span multiple continents and several decades. With images from India, Indonesia, Cambodia, Egypt, Turkey, Tibet, Hawaii and Southwest America, Connor has created a transcendent body of work that evokes a sense of wonder as equally for the natural world as for our human endeavors in it.

Light Lure consists of large-scale underwater pinhole photographs made at each of the 19 fishing piers along the North Carolina coast. Her handmade pinhole cameras were constructed with cookie tins, fishing line and weights, and waterproof tape then submerged into the Atlantic Ocean. The resulting images are wildly colorful, often painterly and always enigmatic; as easily a representation of cellular biology or deep space as the underwater environ it documents. By highlighting both the science and mystery inherent in photography, as well as the vast unknowable waters of this earth, these photographs ignite the imagination.

New Orleans-based creative duo Jeff Louviere and Vanessa Brown, aka Louviere + Vanessa, combine photography, film, painting and printmaking to achieve highly original, thought-provoking works that push the boundary of each medium. For them the “medium of photography is more important than any one photo,” especially evident in the series Counterfeit, which aptly explores the tension between photography and painting, realism and abstraction.

Maggie Taylor creates enigmatic and surrealistic photographic montages through digital means. Found objects, photographs by the artist, vintage tintypes and various ephemera are collected and placed directly onto a flatbed scanner. The scanned elements are layered and manipulated in Adobe Photoshop to create magical worlds akin to a folk art of dreams, or clandestine inner landscapes. One such image can take several months to create and include up to 60 layers of imagery.

Bittersweet on Bostwick Lane is a selection of images from Worsham’s larger body of work, Some Fox Trails in Virginia, which highlights, among other things, the artist’s relationship to Margaret, her childhood neighbor. Margaret’s intricate stories and rich memories build layers of meaning for Worsham as she recollects her family history, and heals from the loss of her parents and brother.

Just in time for the 2012 presidential election as well as the release of Steven Spielberg’s Richmond-filmed “Lincoln,” Candela Books + Gallery presents Taking Liberties, a selection of photographs from Virginia photographer Greta Pratt. The exhibition draws on several series of her work including “Using History,” her portraits of The Association of Lincoln Presenters, called “Nineteen Lincolns,” “The Wavers,” which document Liberty Tax Service employees, and the most recent “Trail Maids.