The Visual and Dramatic Arts Department at Rice University is pleased to present “Business & Pleasure, Fifty Years of Photographs” by Paul Hester with an opening reception on January 17, 2019, from 6-8 PM at the Rice Media Center Gallery. The photography instructor emeritus is sharing fifty years of his professional and personal life through a wide assortment of photographs from film and digital cameras.

The salon style show will cover the first and second floor walls of the Rice Media Center and include images from Hester’s undergraduate years at Rice in the Sixties. During that time the camera used in the beginning photography classes was the 4×5 view camera under the instruction of Geoff Winningham. Advanced students were offered the use of many different cameras and lenses from the store room of the Media Center: Leica M-4, Widelux (a 35mm camera with a moving lens that rotates 140 degrees), Olympus Pen F half-frame, 120mm Yashica, Nikon F, even a fisheye lens.

The retrospective will showcase a wide variety of photographs from his Rice undergraduate years, through many commissioned and self-assigned projects, and including his most recent work. Taking the shapes of square, rectangular, 4×5, 35mm, elongated 35mm panoramas, and biggest of all, pictures from a Cirkut camera that he used in 1982 to re-photograph points of view recorded in negatives from the 1920s and 1930s. The Cirkut camera is a 19th century panorama camera that turns 360 degrees on a turntable atop a tripod, making a negative that is 8 inches tall and 60 inches long.

“Business & Pleasure” will be on view at the Rice Media Center gallery through February 22nd. Gallery Hours are 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, Monday through Friday. For more information visit vada.rice.edu or email [email protected]