By Carolyn Schuk

 

The essence of the photographer's art is the art of seeing. Santa Clara photographer Gary Balaschak uses his camera to frame scenes that most of us see every day. And by doing so, Balaschak's work opens up entirely new perspectives on the commonplace.

 

In this month's Silicon Valley Open Studios (SVOS) art tour, visitors will be able to see Balaschak's black and white photographs taken over the last three decades – including AVArtfest (Alliance of Visual Artists) award-winning pieces -- in the studio behind his historic Monroe St. home.

 

A native of Manhattan's East Village, Balaschak started taking pictures when he was 12 and studied art and photography at New York's venerable Parsons School of Art and Design. He ultimately decided against pursuing a career as a professional photographer and became an engineer, coming to Silicon Valley in the 1980s as technology marketing executive.

 

But high tech never displaced photography in Balaschak's life, and while he was working in Silicon Valley's fast lane for companies like Rolm and Cisco, he kept taking pictures.

 

Balaschak is modest about his work. "The only thing I'm doing in taking a picture is [capturing] what I see when I look at a scene" he explains. "What I hear form other people is that I see things differently and what I'm doing is share what I see."

 

One of those differently seen images is his [name], taken at a recent San Jose Jazz Festival, that shows only the legs of two women standing next to a fence. "It's one of the hardest pictures to print," Balaschak says, "because of the detail of the shoes."

 

Another intriguing picture is of fire escapes, taken at a different angle from where we normally look at those iron structures snaking up the sides of buildings. "I like playing with the shapes of buildings, the geometry."

 

For the Open Studios, Balaschak will also be showing a series of pictures taken immediately after September 11, which express the artist's sensitivity to the smallest, most poignant detail. "Every yellow ribbon had a name," he says simply.

 

Balaschak has always worked primarily in traditional black and white film, developing his pictures himself in his darkroom. "My cameras are very basic, very manual," he explains.

 

In a digital age, artists like Balaschak face new challenges. "The supply of [different varieties of] paper has shrunk," he says. "I'm experimenting with chemicals to change the tone of the image. In the old days you would have just bought different paper.

 

I'm not anti-digital," he explains. But Balaschak's art it the entire process from film to image on paper. "I'm thinking about putting together a display of how you get [from film] to a finished image," he says. "Traditional black and white photography is becoming totally art – like oil painting."

 

For information about Silicon Valley Open Studios visit www.svos.org or email  info@svos.org.

 

Carolyn Schuk can be reached at cschuk@earthlink.net.