Ira Wagner began studying photography in 2008, after working on Wall Street for more than 25 years. With an interest in urban history and design, he has primarily focused on photographing the urban landscape. He received his MFA from the Hartford Art School in 2013 and taught photography at Monmouth University in New Jersey from 2013 to 2021. He is currently the Executive Director of the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, NJ. For his MFA project, Superior Apartments, he spent two years photographing the landscape of the Bronx. In Houseraising, he photographed houses being raised on the Jersey Shore following Hurricane Sandy. This project was featured in The New Republic, The National Geographic, and was released in a photobook by Daylight Books in 2018. His most recent completed project, Twinhouses of the Great Northeast observes how people choose to mark and separate their spaces in Northeast Philadelphia. He received an artist grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts in 2018. Based on images from Twinhouses, he was selected a Critical Mass Top 50 photographer by Photolucida and participated in Review Santa Fe. Twinhouses was also highlighted in a number of photography blogs including The Washington Post and Lenscratch and was exhibited in the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts in 2021. In addition to his interest in the built environment, he turned his eye to the structure of woods and natural areas in New Jersey and elsewhere in his travels. He is also currently working on photographing the landscape along the Northeast Corridor train route between New York and Washington.
Ira Wagner: Fall, Watchung Reservation #2
After 16 years of walking the dogs by the woods near my house I decided to take a picture. It was fall. The leaves were at their peak. I had walked that way before, thousands of times in fact. Then I began to see. See the trees, see the light, the direction of the sun, the cycle of the year. The Muse of the Forest had opened my eyes.
The forest gave me pictures. The pictures changed; the forest changed – subtle changes. The changes you only notice when you look at the same thing every day, when you truly see the same thing every day. Every day was different.
The year has cycles – cycles that you can see. The sunrise moving south over the horizon from the summer to the winter solstice and then turning to the north. The buds turning to leaves, the color from soft yellow to deep green back to fiery orange, brown and then gone. Blankets of snow and crystalline ice.
The light is unpredictable. What it illuminates changes. A different angle every day. A different time of the walk. Looking left, or right. The space between the leaves, or the branches.
Over the years my approach to photographing these places changed. I have explored more broadly and progressed from an i-phone to a high-resolution medium format digital camera to composting of multiple high-resolution images to maximize focus and details. The image submitted is from my most recent approach, seeking to place the woods in front of me into an organized structural composition.
I looked through my email archive to see if I could find anything about the first meeting of our photography critique group and to my surprise, it was December 4, 2014. While the membership has changed, there are many original participants, and we are still going strong. I had finished getting an MFA degree in 2013 and I missed the camaraderie and feedback from my classmates as well as the opportunity to engage with a group of highly creative people with many different genres and approaches to photography. I have learned so much from our critique group – both artistically and technically. This is a very warm and friendly group; while feedback may not always be positive, it is always delivered thoughtfully and with respect. Our continuing meetings is a spur to continue working – so important
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