Know Your Neighbors – Bob Creamer
Thank you to Clark Semmes for this 11th installment of his 2,361 part series, Know Your Neighbors:
The tiny corpse of a hummingbird led Bob Creamer to his latest art form. He and his kids were walking home from Baskin Robbins when they stumbled on one, and Bob picked it up to show them the multicolored luminescence of the bird’s feathers. He later placed the bird on his new scanner to see if it could capture the fine detail of its plumage. Digitized and enlarged, the image was stunning, and it wasn’t long before Bob was using his scanner to capture images from all sorts of flora and fauna. Bob is modest about his achievement, pointing out that the person who first Xeroxed his own posterior created the art form. Nonetheless, the images created by Bob and his scanner (he is now on his third) are world-renowned, and a one-man show of his work has been in a traveling Smithsonian exhibition since 2006.
Bob prepares his floral subjects in a “greenhouse” that would distress some gardeners—a few of the flowers are fresh and perfect, but many are in varying stages of decay. The process produces some amazing results: many of the floral images appear to be actual dried flowers—albeit on a gigantic scale—and not just copies of flowers. Bob says that some people actually try to scrape at the edge of the image with a thumbnail to see if it will come off the page. The scale of the images—approximately three feet by three feet—turns the flowers into something else altogether: one can see planets or caves or worlds inside a peony’s curled petals. Bob suspends the flowers from the ceiling, then raises and lowers them to get the effect he wants. Sometimes the manipulation goes even further—he might burn the dried flowers, for example, then photograph the ashes. The manipulation takes place before the scanner does its work, not after: Bob does very little to the image after it’s captured.
Art and nature have always been part of Bob’s life. He majored in botany in college, then decided to explore his creative side and enrolled at the Maryland Institute College of Art. After graduation, he lived in Maine and Boston before returning to Baltimore to start an architectural photography business. He also became a photography professor at the Community College of Baltimore County at Catonsville, and continues both to this day. Bob also extends himself to other artists via two non-profit organizations he helped found. One is Echo Hill, an outdoor school in Kent County that he co-founded in 1972. Many students at Gilman and Park School still spend a week of their school year at Echo Hill. The other is Arts at Still Pond Station, an artist retreat located in a former life guard station in Kent County. Artists can rent studios at Still Pond and create art while experiencing the beauty and quiet of the Still Pond area.
Bob’s work and be seen at www.creamerphoto.com. There is also a fascinating video of Bob demonstrating how he creates his images, including the burning of flowers on his scanner, at http://www.sciencefriday.com/videos/watch/10180. Bob will be holding an open house at his Mt. Washington home studio in June, where his work will be offered at a significantly discounted “friends price.”
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