Continuum is 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.

Light Lure consists of large-scale underwater pinhole photographs made at each of the 19 fishing piers along the North Carolina coast. Johnson’s 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.

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.

Chris McCaw, with his massive handmade cameras that can weigh up to 125 pounds and require specially-made carts, and the almighty sun co-create images that push photography into the realm of sculpture. The creation/destruction cycle so inherent to life on this planet is harnessed by the hand of the artist into unpredictable, highly-crafted and sublime images

Candela presents vintage prints from a major collection of Mitchel’s work entitled New York Nights, along with some select images from other bodies of work. Most of the prints exhibited were taken from the 1960s through the 1990s and depict the beauty and desolation and intrigue of the city by recording the lives of those who frequent the clubs and missions and synagogues and pool halls; and those who work the fish markets, the firemen who respond to desperate situations; the commuters on the ferries and trains and subways; the revelers and lovers at Coney Island or parading through Little Italy. These images are as diverse as the city itself but the unifying thread here is the clarity of vision and sometimes haunting intimacy of an unerring photographer combined with the craftsmanship of a great darkroom technician.

From the 1940s to the early 1960s, Gita Lenz (1910 – 2011) created a body of work that withstands comparison to many of the better-known photographers of the time. Aaron Siskind was both a friend and strong influence. Like Siskind, who started out as a social documentarian and member of the Photo League in New York, Lenz’s work ranges from the humanist to the abstract. She spent much of her time making images of the people and the city around her.

For more than thirty-five years, American photographer Shelby Lee Adams has worked dedicatedly and deliberately with a view camera and film, returning each year to eastern Kentucky, to the mountains where he was born and raised, to the people he has befriended and been accepted by, to create a lasting chronicle of a mountain people.