Photographs by Cali

“Booklist” by Cali Hobgood-Lemme

Cali Hobgood-Lemme makes hand-colored black and white photographs. Her current body of work incorporates objects from everyday life. “Right now I think my pieces have the essence of a stage set; isolating these everyday items gives them an iconic nature that moves the images from the everyday to a moment from our lives.”

About “Booklist” she says, “I love this image – the way it came into my mind, the feelings it provokes in the viewer, the reasons I chose each of the books included in the piece. Everyone who sees it has a story about it and I think many people end up taking the piece home to help keep that feeling, that glimpse of who they were and what they were doing when they first read books incorporated in the piece.

“I love to hear the stories behind why people are buying the image – a gift for a high school librarian who’d struggled with his school board to allow “The Catcher in the Rye” in 1955, a bookshop owner who was closing their doors after 32 years, a very well-dressed businessman who turned to his lovely wife and surprised her by saying he’d narrated “Our Town” in school.”

“John Taylor’s Shirts” by Cali Hobgood-Lemme

About “John Taylor’s Shirts” she says, “I love this image – its simplicity, its precision. It’s about many things - my father, the smell of clean laundry, and precision, and why all of those things together are good.

“My father was a very well-dressed man, a professor, and when I was a girl he used to send his shirts out to the cleaners. They’d come back to him folded and pinned around pieces of cardboard and stacked in a box, and when he put them on he’d add the piece of cardboard they were wrapped around to a stack on his closet shelf. Those pieces of cardboard were the biggest prize - my brothers and I used them for drawing paper. The mystery of my father's closet, with its smells of wool and pipe tobacco and shoe leather, was part of that ritual of reaching up on tiptoe to get those cardboard rectangles. Those memories - of a man in a crisp white shirt, of feeling secure, are what I think this piece is about.”

Cali lives in Illinois with her husband and son and has been in business as an art photographer since 1986. “All of my photographic work is done by my hand, using standard silver processes in a traditional black and white darkroom. I adore shooting film – the way the camera feels in my hands as the shutter releases and the film advances, the darkroom sounds of running water, the way each image slowly appears on the surface of the paper the exact same way as the very first photograph I ever printed did in 1978 in my junior high darkroom when I was 15 years old.”

There’s still more to the process, though. “I use artist’s oils to add color to the photographs – it’s a very traditional technique that gives an almost three-dimensional quality to the images, especially when combined with my high-contrast printing style. Between the variability of printing each negative individually and then hand-coloring the photographs one at a time, each piece in an edition is the same and yet different.”

2007 is Cali’s fifteenth year of exhibiting at outdoor art festivals. She’s been the recipient of several grants and private commissions. Her work is displayed in galleries, shops, museums, and juried and invitational art festivals across the country.