Last year, local artist Sean Scheidt won a juried salon at the now defunct Hexagon Space with a mixed-media piece. As a result, he was given a solo exhibition. Scheidt says the organizers were surprised when he wanted to show mostly photographs, though they acquiesced. Reactions of that sort are common in Baltimore, Scheidt says. “I do mixed media and photography,” he says. “I’ve always found more room to show the stuff with paint involved.”

Scheidt has since become a member of (in parenthesis), a new photography collective that aims to create more opportunities for photographers and videographers to show their work. The group, composed of six local photographers of diverse backgrounds, wants to create a community for photographers and a forum for discussion about the field. Ultimately they hope to establish a permanent gallery dedicated to contemporary photography.

Urbanite photographer and Gutter magazine co-founder J.M. Giordano dreamed up the idea. “Baltimore is a clique-ish place when it comes to art,” he says. “So what you have now are photographers who aren’t part of a certain group, and they’re relegated to cafés and bars. . . . We don’t have a space dedicated to contemporary photography, while most cities have at least one.”

Early this fall, Giordano met with five other photographers and, with the encouragement of Baltimore Museum of Art Director Doreen Bolger, the collective was formed. It wasn’t long before the group was given the opportunity to launch its first show, at the Urbanite@Case[werks] gallery on St. Paul Street. “It was the kick in the pants that we needed,” says collective member Marian Glebes, photographer, mixed-media artist, and frequent curator.

Judging by the attendance at the opening of its first show, the audience is there. More than 200 people attended the opening of Fields of Vision on Dec. 2. For the show, each member—Scheidt, Giordano, Glebes, Jill Fannon, Dean Alexander, and frequent City Paper contributor Josh Sisk—selected a genre and chose several photographers to survey within that genre. Because of the layout of the gallery, the genres—modern portraiture, performance in photography, landscapes, alternative processing, photojournalism, and contemporary fashion—are not necessarily discretely grouped; one wouldn’t even know that they had been the organizing principle, in fact. In the course of choosing their pieces and hanging the show, the curators discovered that there was a good deal of overlap between their chosen areas.

“The show winds up meshing together really well,” Glebes says as she helps hang a mysterious, vaguely disturbing photo by Aiden Simon of a seminude figure lying in a field of tall grass. “You lay the rules so you don’t have to stick to them. That’s part of the fun of the show.”

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