By Chrystal Fortt

Features Editor

The “Traditions” exhibit at  Bakersfield College’s Wylie and May Louise Jones Gallery is filled with traditional film photography of Virginia and old postcards.

Margaret Nowling is the curator for the gallery and chose the artists for this exhibit because she thought their work was interesting and it was time for the photography media to be shown.

The gallery features two photographers who live in Virginia: Andrew Zimmerman and Michelle Rogers.

“They use traditional wet lab techniques. They’re not digital photographs, they are manipulated in the dark room and that sort of thing,” said Nowling.

Zimmerman’s photography collection portrays landscapes of Virginia.

“This man Andrew Zimmerman, he takes photos with a large format camera so the negative for the images is the same size as the image,” said Nowling.

“He’s not enlarging the image at all. It’s just directly from the negative and that’s not so common anymore,” said Nowling.

The size of the camera and photographs allows Zimmerman to really capture great detail in each Virginian landscape.

Like Zimmerman, Rogers also lives in Virginia.

“The woman who we’re showing here, Michelle Rogers, is a native of France, but she’s a U.S. citizen and she has been now for 20 years,” said Nowling.

Rogers approaches her photography differently than Zimmerman and has a little more peculiar project than most photography projects.

“She takes historic postcards that you might buy at an antique store and she combines those with photographs that she’s taken,” said Nowling.

“And then she manipulates them in the dark room and she does a variety of things to them,” she said.

Her photographs have a really antique look to them since they’re not completely black and white.

They have a tinge of beige color as if the photographs were put in an antique photo filter.

Rogers takes the black and white photos and bleaches or tones her photos until they have achieved an antique feel.

“They all look like they go together although her photos could not have been taken back when the photos of the postcards were taken,” said Nowling.

The exhibit runs Oct. 20 to Nov. 10 and the gallery is open Monday through Thursdays from 1 to 4 p.m.