The Bundy Museum Presents:

Dual Realities:
Photography by Kaitlyn Hession

First Friday Opening Reception November 1st, 2024
6:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Exhibition on display from 11.1.24 – 12.3.24
Located in the Bundy Museum 3rd floor art gallery
Admission to the art gallery is always free
Tuesday - Saturday 11:00 am - 5:00 pm

• No RSVP is required for the First Friday event

For regular visiting hours, walk-ins are welcome, however, booking a reservation online is recommended. Upon arriving, please check in at our visitor’s center at 133 Main St., Binghamton NY.

Coming Soon:

Watch a virtual tour of the gallery below or in the videos section at Facebook.com/bundymuseum and The Bundy Museum YouTube channel.

Artist Statement:

Film Photography has played a key part of my young adult life. Growing up, I’ve always shot photos on a small digital camera or my family’s Polaroid when I was really young. I never learned how to take photos on a film camera until I started studying photography in community college.

One of my courses I had to take during my time there involved not only shooting images on a film camera, but also, using a darkroom to develop those photos I took. Being born in 1996 and growing up during a time where technology was evolving digitality, I’ve never heard of this process until then. As I learned everything behind it, I began to love it.

While learning about this medium, I was taught the ‘Sandwiching’ method. At first I was confused by the wording of this, but then I later found out that it doesn’t involve any food. Similar to double exposures, another method used by film photographers, ‘Sandwiching’ consists of taking two (or sometimes more) negatives and stacking them together in an enlarger or scanner.

To me, this technique is one of my favorites I've learned over the years because you could take an image with not much detail or attention to it and turn it into something otherworldly. The ‘Double Exposure’ method is something I use as well, but sometimes the results aren’t always perfect. Sandwiching allows more freedom for me to take an image and combine it with another to make something amazing.

For Dual Realities, I combined some of my favorite minimalistic black & white and color analog photography and created images through the technique I’ve described that will bring viewers into another world. If you’re a film photographer, I'd definitely recommend trying this technique next time you’re in a darkroom!

Artist Bio:

Kaitlyn Hession is a photographer who has worked in many different fields of photography ranging from portraiture and landscapes to photojournalism and film.

One of her most notable projects, The Vacant Society, has been on display in the past in the Binghamton Photo Gallery. For this art exhibition, Kaitlyn wanted to work more with the film aspect of photography; more specifically, the method of ‘sandwiching’ negatives together.

This was one of the darkroom methods Hession learned while attending community college and working in the institution’s darkroom as a Lab Monitor. ‘Sandwiching’ negatives involves stacking two film negatives on top of another, forming a sandwich. With this technique, one photo could be manipulated in several ways depending on the photo it is matched with. With this idea in mind, Dual Realities was born.

Kaitlyn Hession received her Associates of Science from Tompkins Cortland Community College where she majored in Photography. She also holds a Bachelor's degree in New Communication Media from the State University of New York at Cortland. During her time at these institutions, Hession’s work was displayed in the colleges’ art galleries and in a local media outlet where she interned as a journalist.

Art Exhibit Virtual Tour: (Coming Soon)
Dual Realities: Photography by Kaitlyn Hession

Feel free to direct any feedback by contacting us.

The Bundy Museum of History & Art

129 Main St. Binghamton, NY 13905

(607) 772-9179 - info@bundymuseum.org