All Pawtucket All The Time

 

    Photo Image By Matt Kierstead 

 PAWTUCKET, RI – The company that Matt Kierstead found himself among is impressive. In 2006, local artist, designer, Pawtucket promoter and real estate developer Morris Nathanson illustrated a poster for the Pawtucket Arts Festival, and this year, the City is naming a bridge after him. Three years ago, well-known local painter Gretchen Dow Simpson’s painting, “Hope” was selected for the poster. Her work has travelled internationally, and graced the covers of New Yorker magazines numerous times. And last year, a beautiful, yet almost haunting image painted by Penelope Manzella was chosen. Penelope has studied and painted all over the world for the past thirty years. But Matt Kierstead is deserving of this company, and in fact, he has the honor of also being the first photographer picked by the Arts Festival committee. 

Matt says, “I am grateful for being chosen and flattered to be in the company of the previous poster artists. I also think it’s great that the committee was willing to take a chance and use photography. It’s as legitimate an art-form as any other, even if its ability to capture the truth does not always appeal to everyone.” 

The truth Matt speaks of is the gritty, industrial nature of his large-format photos. His work has always had a strong relationship with industrial architecture, and with a day job at PAL, the Public Archeology Lab in Pawtucket, Matt is exposed daily to some awe-inspiring industrial complexes throughout New England. 

Unlike the past two years, where the paintings were chosen after the fact (both paintings were created around 2003), this photo was brand new, and has not been shown anywhere else previously. “I had the picture on my list of images to shoot for some time,” Matt says. “When asked to do the poster, it appealed to me immediately as the right image, particularly in the way it relates to some of the previous poster images. I don’t really think about my compositions; they just have to be strong. I knew I needed a vertical composition for the poster. I prefer to shoot in cloudy, bright, shadowless light, so at first I did not like the light when I set up. Now, though, I think the two diagonal shadows add something to the geometry.” 

Once again, Malcolm Grear design in Providence stepped up to place the image within the context of a poster promoting the yearly Arts Festival. Their design is constrained and therefore very classic, using strong white space around the image with just a hint of color in some of the text. Mr. Grear says, “I like the photograph; it feels historic. There is strength in this series, especially for people who collect.” 

J. Hogue, Marketing Committee Chair for 2010, says “I am very pleased with the image and the way it not only presents a present-day working mill in this working-class city, but also in the way the composition pays homage to Gretchen’s and Penelope’s previous work. Matt thought very carefully about this image and how it works within the context of the Festival, and I appreciate that very much.” 

Matt Kierstead is an historian and photographer living and working in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Kierstead’s photography is both an outgrowth of his professional involvement in historic preservation and industrial archaeology, and a personal mission to record the industrial past. Working with a 4 X 5 architectural view camera, he seeks to record the character, structure, spaces, and surviving machinery of Rhode Island and Pawtucket textile mills and other industrial buildings and engineering structures before they are altered or demolished. 

The 2010 Pawtucket Arts Festival Poster is being printed in a limited edition of 75 by i.o. labs in Pawtucket. Hand-signed and numbered, they will be available for purchase at $75 each from Herb Weiss, Economic and Cultural Affairs Officer and Chairman of the Pawtucket Arts Festival, in the Office of Planning and Redevelopment, 175 Main Street. (401) 724-5200. 

PAF Contact: Diane Agostini (401) 724-5200 

Prepared by J. Hogue 

 Marketing Committee Chair 

With the prevalence of digital photography, it may be difficult to remember that cameras use film. The camera that Matt uses takes a sheet of 4? x 5? film. The camera looks like the “old-timey” set-ups that pop-up in old movies, with an operator behind a dark cloth coming off the back of a contraption with black bellows, a big lens, and a tripod. In a lot of ways, the camera is the same. Two independent plates – one that holds the lens and the other that holds the film – can operate independently, letting the photographer skew perspective by adjusting the paralellism of the plates. This is how Matt avoids the common lens refraction that happens with most point and shoot cameras, where the small lens will allow buildings to “bend” in a fish-eye effect as they go out of frame.