GLEN RIDGE, NJ — Walter Oliver, a former Glen Ridge resident now living just over the border in Montclair, recalled recently when photography became more than just snapping pictures to him. Oliver, who is currently on a website created by Glen Ridge High School art teacher Anne Malone listing local artists for her students, said photography became more to him following the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.
“On 9/11, I lost my daughter,” he said. “She was in the North Tower.”
Oliver spent a lot of time after that in introspection, he said: A switch was flipped and he decided to spend more time being creative.
“My losing Leah,” he said, “changed my view of life.”
His daughter died one day short of her 25th birthday. Oliver said this makes the day she died even more difficult.
“There is 9/11, and then the day after,” he said.
He had been given a 35mm by his parents when he graduated college. He dabbled with it and had a small darkroom, shot color slides, but nothing more. But after the tragedy, he started looking harder into the pictures he took. He said he was becoming more aware of his surroundings.
If there was a common thread connecting the photographs at the time, he said it was an attempt to draw calm from a chaotic world.
The first subject matter he approached with this change in attitude was a lake house he had in Sussex County. He took some pictures of it and one of them, “Barn in the Mist,” won a best in show at the 2004 NJ State Fair. He did a series of photographs on this barn and also photographed fences.
He joined a camera club, the Tri-County Camera Club, and soon became its president, moving them from film cameras into the digital world. He served as president from 2006-2007.
He had his first show in 2004 after a friend had a photograph of his framed. The framer liked the photo and asked for more in order to mount a show in her business.
“I brought her 50 prints,” he said. “She liked 40. They were framed and shown at her business. I sold some.”
The success that he had received headed Oliver down a photographic path he did not anticipate and that was photography as a fine art.
“I had turned a corner after 9/11, how I saw the world,” he said. “Now people liked my photographs enough to buy them and hang them on their walls.”
Around 2007, he stopped exhibiting at Tri-Camera Club exhibitions because of the restraints that were put on compositions and subject matter. For instance, he photographed a tulip but it was rejected as being too abstract.
But he was about to find another path.
A photograph of his, in a group show at the Ridgewood Avenue train station, caught the eye of the director of the Watchung Art Center.
“He thought it was a work of art,” Oliver recalled.
He joined a photography workshop at the center called Unique Vision. Oliver said at first it was liberating and more free-thinking to him. But as with Tri-Camera, he began to find it constraining.
This was in 2008 when his personal life, he said, became a little more difficult.
“Under the circumstances, I didn’t do my best work,” he said. “I struggled for a year or two.”
But on Jan. 1, 2010, he went to Coney Island with his camera to see the annual ocean dip by the Polar Bear Club.
“I was walking along the boardwalk,” he said. “I noticed a police callbox on which someone had scratched the work ‘adore.’”
He took a picture of it and did nothing more about it for six months. At this time, he had also joined an artists collective in Montclair named Studio Montclair. And the photo of the call box was well-received by the collective when he showed it.
“I started looking, in New York City, for like images using graffiti and text,” he said. “A message was coming to me but I didn’t see it.”
He produced 450 of these images. With a group of photographers from the Mill Street Salon, which is located in Bernardsville, he exhibited a number of these pictures at Kean University from November 2014 to February 2015.
From the myriad of images, he exhibited and labeled 54 of these graffiti-and-text photographs. They were exhibited in a collage-like manner, and labeled with one of eight words describing emotive relationships: lonely; plaintive; she; adore; hateful; ambivalent; declaration; and heart.
“If there’s been any message, since 2003, my photography goes where my emotions go,” he said. “And I always strive for serenity. But concurrent to all this development, I still don’t know where it’s going and I guess that’s OK.”
Oliver has shot portfolios for GRHS art students and paintings for Glen Ridge and Montclair residents.
“I’m happy to say that every student’s work that I photographed had gotten into the school of their choice. I represented their work well.”
His most current series is that of moving feet.
Oliver’s photographic website can be viewed at: www.walteroliver.com.
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