David Freund: Gas Stop, a sampling of 27 black and white photographs pulled from a much larger investigation that Freund conducted from 1978 to 1981, are on display in the Lowenstein Center’s Lipani Gallery now through March 30.

The photos are a time capsule of sorts, from an era when some 200,000 independent full-service gas stations dotted the American landscape. Only half still exist today, replaced by larger, more uniform chain stations operated by corporations.

Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, artist in residence at Fordham and curator of the Lipani and Ildiko Butler galleries said Freund’s work, which will be published in a forthcoming set of books by Steidl Publishing is appealing on multiple levels. Car enthusiasts can catch glimpses of classic models, architecture buffs can take in a variety of designs of the buildings themselves, and graphic designers can observe hand-made signs that reflect regional differences in 40 states.

“It’s a lovely testament to something that’s really vanished. The idea of the mom-and-pop, local gas station has been replaced by the megastructure with 19 different filling bays,” he said.

“When you look at these photographs, you realize there was an incredible variety prior to the rise of the Texaco stations.”

Apicella-Hitchcock said that Freund, a professor emeritus of photography at Ramapo College of New Jersey, came to his attention in in 2014, when Freund attended the Fordham show Gary Metz: Quaking Aspen: A Lyric Complaint at the Ildiko Butler Gallery.

The Lipani Gallery, which is located in the visual arts complex, is the ideal place for the photos’ display, said Apicella-Hitchcock, as they exemplify the kind of original research students are tasked with creating.

“I like this exhibition because of its classic, sober demeanor,” said Apicella-Hitchcock.

“It’s someone going out into the field, methodically researching his subject, finding the results, exploring tangents, finding the lay of the land, and then presenting the information in a large, multi-volume set.”

David Freund: Gas Stop is on display at the Lipani Gallery daily from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. A reception and artist talk will take place Wednesday, March 22 from 6 to 8 p.m.

The undergraduate students—Alexandra Bandea, Andrew DiSalvo, Marisa Folsom, Phillip Gregor, and Erin O’Flynn—spent the month of July in Rome for a Department of Visual Arts course, Photography in the Documentary Tradition. The group visited ancient architectural sites, museums, neighborhoods, and other sites throughout the city practicing basic and advanced techniques of image production. In particular, the students focused on how to craft documentary photos of the people, architecture, and culture of Italy.

“[They learned to] observe, process, and translate life into a rectangular image,” said course instructor Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, the visual arts program’s artist-in-residence. “They considered everything as potential photographs, from the glorious Sistine Chapel, to the not-so-glorious Fiumicino Airport.”

The students’ photographs were then compiled into a 68-page book, Documentary Photography: Italy 2016, published earlier this month.

“If most photographs are exposed somewhere around 1/125th of a second, then collectively the exposure time of the images in this book adds up to barely a single second,” Apicella-Hitchcock said. “However, the impressions, both sacred and profane, that Italy has made on the group will certainly last for much longer.”

“There’s something bordering on spiritual when all the elements of the world by chance are in synchronicity, and you—and only you at that moment in time—are paying homage to time itself,” he said.

As artist in residence in the Department of Visual Arts and programmer for the Ildiko Butler Gallery, Lipani Gallery, and Hayden Hartnett Project Space, Apicella-Hitchcock wears several hats at Fordham. One is supervision of Documentary Photography Japan, a six-year-old course in which he chaperones six to eight students on a trip to Japan over the winter break.

Apicella-Hitchcock taught at the Tokyo University of the Arts in 2005. He said that, like New York, Tokyo is the kind of place where the more you look for things to photograph, the more interesting it becomes. He and fellow visual arts professor Joseph Lawton teach a similar course in Italy in the summer. In both cases, upon return stateside some 3,000 images are edited down to 64, which are then printed and bound in a book.

Both are digital courses. Apicella-Hitchcock said the goal is to appeal to students with digital photography, which has become democratized thanks to the ubiquitousness of cameras on phones.

“But then we take these interested parties and hook them into the more sophisticated photography, which is photographic syntax: putting together sequences of images that build up and create a larger meaning than the individual integers,” he said.

“The meaning in between the photographs is where the poetry of the art form comes out. One can start to create flashbacks or premonitions of what is to come. One can definitely develop subtleties, so it’s not just the bombast of a greatest hits.”

One of the joys of working with a small group of students is witnessing how creative they can be, since they have no pre-conceived notions about the craft, he said.

“I say to students, only you can do what you’re doing at this point in time. Only you have your sensitivities, your history, your cultural background, your gender background, and your age. And since you’re college students, your youthful enthusiasm is an asset. Your fearlessness allows you to barge into situations that you have no businesses being in, had you thought about it. And consequently, you get amazing primary research.”

With the Ildilko Butler gallery, Apicella-Hitchcock works with students who have finished their senior projects, faculty showing off their latest works, and artists whose projects fit the bill for a specific theme. Sometimes it’s as thematically open as landscapes; other times its more specific, like the 2013 collection of art forgeries that was timed around the Fordham/FBI International Conference on Cyber Security.

“I corral artists, I trust them. They make something, and afterwards you find sometimes tenuous but genuine connections between the works, which is an exploration for them and for myself as well, which is why [artists]do it,” he said.

He lists Gary Metz: Quaking Aspen: A Lyric Complaint, which Apicella-Hitchcock curated with Lawton in the winter of 2014, as one of his favorite exhibits. Metz took black and white landscape pictures of Aspen, Colorado, that challenged the prevailing notions of nature as sublime, heroic, and unspoiled. Metz assumed the viewer was intelligent, and could handle a certain amount of ambiguity, Apicella-Hitchcock said.

“Unlike a stereotypical Hollywood film, you don’t see the ending coming from a mile away. It’s more like European art film, where, even though you’ve watched the movie 20 times, you’re still not sure what its about,” he said.

Advances in technology have opened up new realms in photography, and Apicella-Hitchcock said he’s particularly intrigued by cameras that can now operate in extremely low light, without the need for flashes. But in the end, he said a good photograph always depends more on the human behind the camera.

“I think it was Paul Strand who said in order to make a good photograph, you have to have something to say about the world. Photography is still all about encoding that image with the photographer’s sensibilities, intelligence, and sensitivity to whoever or whatever was in front of them,” he said.

(Untitled, by Kota Sake)

Last year, a former Fuji film 35-minute processing lab in the Araiyakushi district of Tokyo became the monthly showcase for an unconventional collective of photographers. The space was so small and the shows proved so popular that Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, a Fordham professor spending a semester in Japan, often found it hard to get inside.

The space showcased the artists, known as the 35minutesmen, for only one year. But the photographs, coupled with the act of creating one’s own exhibit space, so impressed Apicella-Hitchcock that he decided to bring the work to Fordham’s Center Gallery.

On Saturday, Nov. 6, the Center Gallery opens its doors on “35minutesmen”, a photo exhibit of a seven-artist collective that Apicella-Hitchcock calls an “an anomaly of the Tokyo art world.”

“They are seven artists who said, ‘let’s do this ourselves,’ which is unheard of in the very insulated Tokyo art world,” said Apicella-Hitchcock, who is co-curating the show with Anibal Pella-Woo, adjunct professor of visual arts.

“We thought it would be wonderful for our students to see these artists’ ‘do it yourself’ strategy to showing their work, now more than ever, because today nobody knocks down the door to offer most artists a chance to show their work,” he said. “Their communal spirit and energy will hopefully serve as encouragement for young photographers and emerging artists to create their own peer support structure and exhibition opportunities.”

More than just an art show, said Apicella-Hitchcock, the 35minutesmen exhibits created a blurring of the boundaries between art and everyday life, one in which the shows themselves led viewers to socially interact and create a community around the shows and their openings.

The 35minutesmen consist of photographers 大同朋子 Tomoko Daido, 福村順平 Junpey Fukumura, ペイ PAI, 酒航太 Sake Kota, 長広恵美子 Emiko Nagahiro, 真田敬介 Keisuke Sanada, and 塩田正幸 Masayuki Shioda.

Apicella-Hitchcock and Pella-Woo chose the Center Gallery show from a year’s worth of images sent via email from all seven artists, in black and white, color, Polaroids, and both digital and film-based photos. Also available will be a catalog of their work, said Apicella-Hitchcock.

The opening reception will be held on Friday, Nov. 12 from 6 to 8 p.m. in the Center Gallery, Lowenstein Center, Lincoln Center campus. The show will be on display every day from 8 am. to 8 p.m. through December 19th.

As a complement to the show, Apicella-Hitchcock will be teaching a four-credit course this December in “Photography in the Documentary Tradition: Japan,” that includes a trip to Tokyo and Kyoto over the Christmas and New Year’s break.

— Janet Sassi