“Fiber Arts” covers a lot of ground – from wall hangings, to quilts, to handmade papers. These forms present challenges not found with other more solid forms of art. For one, fiber has a flow -- even though it is primarily a 2 dimensional medium, it is almost never shot perfectly flat. Beyond just having color, it can be translucent and multi-layered as well. When walking past a piece on display, you’d see all of those kinds of details as your viewing angle changed -- but in a still photograph your angle never changes so each of these aspect must be represented in some area within the shot. That can mean different lighting techniques being applied across one image.
These images are by Junco Sato Pollack. Her work is some of the most complex (from a photographic standpoint) of anything I shoot.
The piece at left is translucent, multi-layered, and dyed. The piece on the right is also multi-layered and dyed, but add highly metallic surfaces and also a photographic cloud pattern which is fused into the dyed areas.

A detail shot and an overall shot of works by Katie Gothreau.

Katie’s work is translucent, requiring that some parts are lit from the front, while other areas are lit from behind.

The detail shot at left is from a multi-layered piece. To get the moiré pattern caused by the multiple layers to standout, I lit the piece almost entirely by bouncing light off the background.

Two details of quilts by Julia Loffredo.

Detail shots give me the opportunity to play with camera angles and lighting in a way I can’t with the overall shots. For the overall, the viewer should be able to tell the scope of the work – to get a sense of the size and shape. The details can be very dramatic because what we are looking to show is the texture and craftsmanship. What I look for is a focal point where I can exaggerate some element – texture, color, or sheen.

An overall shot plus a detail from the same collection of wall hangings by Carol LeBaron.

Keith Crane’s work was a real surprise to me since I was expecting something more focused on fiber, and instead I found objects sealed in acrylic.

He couldn’t bring his work to the studio, so these were shot at a gallery installation. They were lit for a gallery setting, but the lighting didn’t work well for still photography so I re-lit the gallery to make the pieces standout.

Overall and detail shots of work by Lynn Pollard. For these pieces Lynn worked gold into the fibers.

At left is a very 3 dimensional, tabletop piece by Sophia Frissell.
At right is a much more fluid piece by Zena Zakanycz.

These functional pieces by Junco Sato Pollack are made from kudzu. Developing a method for preparing and working with kudzu fibers has been the main focus of Junco’s more recent work.

Two quilts by Kathy Davis.

The one at left is considerably larger than the one to its right – requiring two different shooting methods for them each to look their best.

The left one was hung with monofilament and separated from the background by 3 or 4 feet. The quilt on the right was from a series about the size as an old record album sleeve. Hanging these would have made them seem lost against the background, so I shot them straight down. To give them some depth (and visually blend them with the series of hanging quilts), I floated them off the background a few inches to pick up a nice shadow around the edges.

Here’s a another unusual approach to fiber arts by Zena Zakanycz.

This was shot for a Georgia State University project.