Dog days in the student art galleries

A series of documentary photographs are displayed at the Merlino student art gallery this week. Chen Carmi's "Polipak" is composed of 64 pictures of a pack of stray puppies living in an industrial area in her home country of Israel.

Carmi, a Cal State Long Beach Masters of Fine Arts program student, took a total of 723 photographs of stray puppies in an industrial habitat. She later narrowed it down to 64 photographs that she displayed in her showcase.

"There are five puppies at the site, however, they are part of a larger pack that spread in the area," Carmi said. "I estimate there are around 15 dogs. I took photos of the other dogs too, but eventually I decided to focus on the young."

The project took Carmi two weeks to collect all the photos of the dogs, who only came out of their shelter late in the afternoon when the harsh summer sun began to simmer. She had about two hours, daily to take pictures of the dogs.

Visitors of the art galleries are invited to switch the pictures on an old fashion slide projector in the dark of the gallery, with only natural light shining through the door. The full-colored pictures were projected against the wall, accompanied by the sounds of dogs barking coming from a small radio. The audio that is featured in the gallery is natural sound collected in Israel after the photographs had been collected.

"I was already in the United States," Carmi said. "I asked my brother Yoav, to visit the dogs again with better recording equipment. So some of the barking you hear was really toward him."

There isn't much in the gallery to distract the viewer from the action and emotion in the documentary photographs. The stray puppies are shown playing with one another, running, lying down and, at one point, even barking at the camera.

Each dog has its own identity in the photograph, even though there was a lot of repetition in the selected photos. The puppies appear scared of humans, but curious about them at the same time. They seem to forget that they are being observed and go about their day.

"While working on the site, I tried to capture the sense of movement, the chaos, and the scattered dusty run of the puppies," Carmi said. "In order to reflect on these happenings, I decided to base the project more on amount of images, repetition and similarities, and less on singular, breathtaking images."

Carmi's fascination with dogs is evident in her project displayed in the gallery. The photographs have such compelling emotions. They draw the audience in and invite people to keep switching to the next picture.

"Lately, I came up with a really simple answer for what motivates me to photograph," Carmi said. "The answer is: I take photos of things that break my heart."

The pictures of the stray puppies draw attention from visitors of the gallery because of how different it is from the other collections in the galleries. "Polipak" is the only piece composed of documentary photographs at this exhibit.

For more information about Chen Carmi's work, visit her website, Chencarmi.com.

The weekly galleries run Monday through Thursday from noon to 5 p.m. between the FA2 and FA3 buildings.

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