Alva Review-Courier -

In the days of film, the most common teaching-camera for students in the USA was the Pentax K1000. Jeanne Parkhurst started using such a camera as a student in the eighth grade at Classen Advanced School of Studies in Oklahoma City. She still uses a K1000 today, along with various digital cameras and an iPhone.

Like many young people, she wanted to get out of town at graduation, and she ended up studying photography at New York University, which she says "was a wonderful experience." Next, she moved to Los Angelas and eventually back home to Oklahoma City.

Parkhurst rejoices that she is now a teacher at the same school that sparked her interest in photography.

She first started experimenting with digital photography in about 2001 when she started college. She said, "Digital was sort of taking over and I definitely played around with it, but I am a person who likes the historical processes and enjoy doing cyanotypes and platinum palladium prints.

"I did come to the conclusion that if I wasn't going to go completely digital, that I probably needed to find another avenue for a career. So teaching became my thing," she said.

The show at Graceful Arts includes 14 black and white images that span the last few years of her life, a transitional period when she moved from New York to Los Angelos.

Noticing she was very pretty, I asked, "How come you haven't been on the other side of the camera?"

She replied, "I have been, I actually have two or three self-portraits in the show right now. Self-portraiture is a genre that goes back thousands of years, and it is something that I have explored. It's not so much that because I'm pretty (and thank you for saying that), but it is the question of who I am, how much of this is being an artist – who am I in this world, how do I relate to other people. So I think that's why there have been so many self-portraits of me."

Parkhurst does sell her work and her email is [email protected].