f8 Pasadena Salon history and what we're all about
Founded in 2007 by Bill Wishner, f8 Pasadena Salon is dedicated to the art and aesthetics of photography —merging photographic philosophy with visual imaging.
Salons consciously follow Horace's definition “either to please or to educate” (“aug delectare aug prodesse est”)”
“A salon is a gathering of like-minded people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation.”
In creating f8 Pasadena an easier track would have been to create the next “camera club” complete with lectures about photographic technique, the newest cameras, the newest printing devices and papers and blend into the meetings snapshots, individual criticism, competitions and the like.
But photography is a rapidly changing art…it has academics teaching, researching, providing perspective of the past and at the same time leading the art into its future; driving what the art might look like as the new generation of photographers and technology emerges.
At the non-academic level, those practicing the art form need to carry on the new conversation of change. The end of this “round table” discourse will never be any final statement regarding what photography is or isn’t but rather a constant re-evaluation of all we held in the past as constant. That’s what f8 Pasadena Salon aspires to be.
With its eclectic contributors and invited guests f8 will continue to explore the new art and aesthetics of photography. Photography will not be held to its little black box ever again.