The Impromptu Gallery

Prints for the Berkshire County
ARC Center for Development

The Center for Development (CFD) is a day habilitation program provided by the Berkshire County Arc for adult citizens of our community with special needs. My son, Matthew, attends the Center, and it is an exceptional program with incredibly dedicated staff members ably serving both the clients and their families. There is a great need for adult day care and community-outreach services not just here in the Berkshires, but throughout our country.

CFD has expanded over the last few years to meet the growing needs of our community, and during this process of expansion I began to notice that there are now many well-illuminated but totally bare off-white walls throughout the center. It occurred to me that I could easily leverage my digital imaging and printing skills along with the equipment resources of Aardenburg Imaging & Archives in order to fill  those empty walls with some large and colorful prints… an impromptu photo gallery in the making if you will. I am sourcing the image content from a sizable collection of my personal photography work completed over a 50+ year span of time. I am also leveraging the idle time capacity of Aardenburg’s new HP Z3200 PS 44-inch printer (purchased for additional print permanence studies of the HP Vivera pigmented ink set) to reach this new personal goal, namely; no more empty and undecorated walls at CFD!

It may take a couple of years or more to accomplish my goal because I will have to pace the project at only one or two large framed pieces per month.  Printing and framing big prints gets expensive, but it is personally rewarding, and I expect the time will go by quickly. I should also mention that I am personally donating all materials and labor for this project. Please be assured that your donations to Aardenburg Imaging & Archives remain earmarked specifically for our print permanence research and other publications of direct relevance to our members. That said, I have chosen to include this special printing project for CFD on the Aardenburg website because I anticipate it will have some potentially synergistic effects on our other work. At the very least it will enable me to share with Aardenburg members some aspects of my photography, printing, and presentation methods I have evolved over the years.

I have only one basic criterion for my choice of images to be printed for CFD. Each image should be easily “approachable” by CFD staff and clients alike.  Thus, the images should not be too abstract, and if they have any common theme at all, it is to bring fun, spontaneous, and typically fleeting moments from the outside world into the indoors care-giving spaces at CFD. Each framed print should also be able stand together with or apart from any of the others such that no undue curatorial burden befalls the staff at CFD, i.e.,  trying to figure what prints should be displayed in which rooms and on what walls!

The images posted on this web page are layer-flattened and down-sampled versions of the digital files prepared for the prints that have been donated to CFD to date. They were converted to sRGB colorspace for web browsing purposes, yet incorporating all the image edits necessary to produce lively prints on fine art matte papers. They manage to convey the color and tonal relationships achieved in the final prints remarkably well, albeit losing out to the prints’ visual appeal because the actual prints (typically larger than 24×36 inches) tempt the viewer to look at them in a way that only real photographic prints displayed on real walls can do!

Best regards,

Mark H. McCormick-Goodhart
Director, Aardenburg Imaging & Archives