Prima Gallery

The flowers are in full bloom, the vegetables look ready to eat, the beach scenes beckon, and there is a glimpse of European travels, all inviting the viewer to "Through the Lens 11," photography by Anne Holland. Anne Holland has returned to The Stable for the second time in the last three years to exhibit her photographs.

The exhibit is Holland’s second at The Stable. There are 45 new pictures in this show.

"I sold 40 pictures at the two-hour reception at The Stable in January 2007," Holland said.

Holland’s life as a photographer began eight years ago. She was moving from her home in Wilton, Conn., to a condo in Danbury, Conn.

"When we put our house on the market I made a little photo book of our perennial gardens. Then it took off from there," she said. "I started making greeting cards with my photos and now my total sales of cards is 11,000."

When she first started taking photos, she borrowed her son’s camera; now she uses a Canon film camera and also has a small camera in her car.

Holland discovered The Stable while visiting her daughter’s family, who are village residents.

"There is nothing like this [The Stable] in Connecticut. It’s my favorite space," she said.

It takes five to six months to prepare for the show, she said.

Morning and evening are the best times to photograph, for the light, commented Holland. She said flowers are her favorite thing to photograph, especially roses.

"Wagon/flowers" was photographed in Palm Desert, Calif., with most of the floral photos shot in Descanso Gardens. "Yellow tulips," "Pink/yellow poppy," "Sunflowers," "Sepia rose," "Peach poppy," "Orange tulips," "Gerber daisy," "Orange zinnia," and "Purple daisy" are also being displayed. Orchids were photographed at the New York Botanical Gardens, as was Chihuly glass. A photo of water lilies was also taken at the Botanical Gardens.

During a trip to Siena, Italy, hats and the flowers adorning them hung outside of a flower shop that caught Holland’s eye.

"Whenever I shoot, I have an idea what people are looking for," she said.

"Blue/yellow pansy" was photographed in Myrtle Beach.

"Restaurant/bike" and "Pizza restaurant" show street scenes in Rome. The Food Court in Barcelona provided vibrant colors for "Cherries/peaches," "Radishes" and "Tomatoes/garlic." "Peppers/lemons" was photographed in Corsica.

Holland called "Tart," taken at Zabar’s Bakery in Grand Central Station, a fun food shot.

Beach scenes photos in the exhibit include "Pilings/seagulls," and "Two canoes" from Martha’s Vineyard, with "Sea shells" her granddaughter brought from Cape Cod. Atlantic City, Myrtle Beach, Cape May and Westport, Mass., also provided interesting shots. She photographed "The Alabama Pilot Boat," an early 1900s vessel, while on a ferry from Oak Bluffs in Martha’s Vineyard.

There is also a look at an Annapolis, Md. home called "Green Shutters."

Holland’s greeting cards are sold throughout Fairfield, Conn., and her photographs are on display at businesses in both Connecticut and New Jersey.

She is a member of the Candlewood Camera Club of Connecticut and has received outstanding achievement awards from the International Society of Photographers, first place in Westport magazine’s photo contest, and first place in the Orlando Sentinel’s photo contest. Her exhibits have been featured at Candlewood Camera Club and three libraries. She will be displaying at another library in April.

With all the galleries sprouting up along H Street NE, the neighborhood may be on its way to becoming Washington's next big arts district, and another addition this weekend will certainly help the area's credibility. G Fine Art, formerly housed along 14th Street, is taking up residence in the up-and-coming neighborhood.

The gallery celebrates its move to Northeast Washington on Saturday with a new exhibition and an opening reception. The work of A.B. Miner goes on display in "Naked," a show that strips down in more ways than one. In one diptych, Miner pulls back the curtain on his creative process, while a massive 12-panel painting shows a year in the life of a post-surgery expanse of skin from a landscape of stitches to a healed, though scarred, chest. Meanwhile the video piece "Fly 08" -- a riff on Yoko Ono's "Fly" -- features the interaction between an insect and a reclining nude figure.

Much of photography’s past is on display at the Association of International Photography Art Dealers Photography Show, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary. But if you are concerned about the future of the medium, there are only a few hints of what might be to come.

Mainly it is a show for collectors of vintage prints. Among the 72 dealers, scores are presenting usual-suspect inventories: Evans, Weston, Arbus and so on. Some, however, have exercised more creativity.

Photology, for one, has a marvelous display of small, sexually provocative Polaroids by a select few, including Helmut Newton, Carlo Mollino, Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe. At Hemphill there is an understatedly poetic series of pictures of old buildings in the South taken in the 1970s with a Kodak Brownie by William Christenberry.

Two galleries present remarkable, though very different, triplets.

Monroe has Eddie Adams’s famous 1968 picture of a South Vietnamese officer shooting a Vietcong suspect in the head, flanked within the same frame by shots in which the prisoner is being escorted by soldiers before his execution and has fallen to the ground after.

Bruce Silverstein has three variations on a subtly surreal 1948 portrait of a preteen girl with strangely bright eyes and curiously dark skin (she’s white). She seems an eerie blend of innocence and witchy experience.

Similarly weird pictures of children by Loretta Lux are at Yossi Milo, but they are in color and slightly distorted digitally. “Marianne,” in a neat powder-blue coat, is lovely if a little spooky, but the strangely solemn, big-eyed twins in polka-dot dresses in another image are scary. They look as if they escaped from Stanley Kubrick’s film “The Shining.”

There is a lot of work in the show that blurs the line between commercial and fine art. Danziger has pictures of the punk goddess Patti Smith by Annie Leibovitz. At PDNB Gallery there are still-life pictures of food by Robyn Stacey. A watermelon with a chunk cut out of it simultaneously calls to mind Baroque-era Spanish Realist painting and illustration for a contemporary gourmet food magazine.

As for the future, Bryce Wolkowitz offers a variety of electronically animated works, including a self-portrait by Shirley Shor that appears on a framed flat screen. Using a program she wrote, Ms. Shor created a composite image in which randomly changing pixels from pictures of herself and about 40 relatives and friends combine into a shimmering, constantly shifting single portrait.

One photographer who definitely has a future is Alex Prager, a young Los Angeleno who makes staged color photographs of women that synthesize the influences of Cindy Sherman, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Douglas Sirk. Her coolly romantic pictures are at Yancey Richardson, and she will be included in a show of new photography at the Museum of Modern Art in the fall.

While the annual Photo Regional may be the best barometer of what's happening in the medium, the "Best of" exhibition series at the Photo Center of the Capital District in Troy, now in its second year, is becoming the gauge of emerging talent.

With 25 artists, "Best of 2009" is rough around the edges, but that's its charm. The 52 frames jam the center's cluttered space with a salon feel. It's easy to miss the pictures lining the tight and winding hallway leading to a "Do Not Enter" sign on a back door.

Exposed pipes and some works hanging on an odd partition -- wobbly as walls in an office cubicle -- add to its casual, unfinished feel.

A majority of the frames are landscapes -- many of the tried-and-true variety -- yet nearly all exhibit a high level of technical execution. There are no real surprises, but some do push the medium. As last year, many artists have taken up photography recently; about one-fifth of the entries were unknown to organizers.

Like the Photo Regional, the "Best of" is organized through an open call. Submissions are whittled down to the best of a single artist. In a new twist, the works not making it to the walls are shown in a video compilation. Visitors are encouraged to vote for their three favorites in keeping with the center's mission of developing new photographers.

In keeping with that spirit, here are my three selections:

"Hotel Movement" by Diane Reiner. A black-and-white geometric image that toggles between the ideas of existence and buildings, work and play, home and travel caught by a keen eye for the moment.

"Storm King at Dusk" by Lynn Palmiter. The Hudson River Valley has been the subject of some great art over the years, and this image adds a level of foreboding and mystery.

"Merging Earth and Sky" by Cheryle Gowie. Using a long exposure, the black-and-white image literally drags the sky to the tree tops, while its use of watercolor paper with various coatings frays the ends into jagged forms.

'Emerging Artists 2010'

Most of the artists don't have regular gallery representation; none went to a formal art school. They seem content to stay on the fringes of the art scene, breaking academic rules of color, form, material and composition with brooding, unabashed glee.

They are gathered in an exhibition called "Emerging Artists 2010" at the Limner Gallery in Hudson through March 27.

The pen/ink and digital image "DJ Change" by Gavin Weir has an Obama-esque figure spinning tunes at a decadent party with dollar bill-laden donkeys and elephants grinding and bumping on stripper poles. "Mary" by Tamara Staser-Meltzer is a caustic paper collage showing a deconstructed Jesus' mother as anything but a virgin.

E. Thurston Belmer's "A Red Home" takes the form of a homey and sedate 19th-century portrait, but startles with its pain and longing, while the highly graphic head shot on oil and canvas in "Obey" by Tim French conjures up fear and loathing in an autocratic society. There's a rough quality of youth to the exhibition, and a wide variety of skill.