Photos offer window on community building

On Saturday, Aug. 15 around a dozen enthusiasts set out from Sykora's Bakery in Cedar Rapids to photograph the Czech Village and New Bohemia neighborhoods with inexpensive Holga cameras.

This basic camera creates unexpected, artistic photos that have developed a devoted following; and it's a common occurrence for flash mobs of photographers to fan out and explore the same subjects. The fruits of this Holga shoot will be on display at The Artisans Sanctuary in late September.

Separated physically by a river, New Bohemia and Czech Village sit side-by-side on the city map. The Holga Shoot had the artistic goal of creating avenues of conversation, shared narrative and collaboration between the two districts.

These photographs will provide a vocabulary and grammar for dialogue that can seep into any dimension of public discourse and community interaction, not just art.

That is the true beauty and value of activities like this photo shoot. (And this proposition no longer needs to be contained to specific places like New Bohemia and Czech Village; it can be about anywhere.) The photographs give us reference points for dialogue. With multiple perspectives, a richness emerges and a strategy for informed, productive interaction materializes.

This plurality of photographs, about two elegant but modest local neighborhoods, offers a modeling of, and then a fluency in, public discourse and community building.

It reminds us how in a dialogue there are similar and disparate motivations within one perspective as there are also layers, facets, angles, dimensions, textures, complexities and dynamics among all perspectives, offering many junctions for collaboration, learning, partnership, opportunity, understanding and - when necessary - mediation and resolution.

Too often when we encounter art such as the soon-to-be-displayed, and what are bound to be gorgeous, photographs, in Czech Village - if we do more than quickly pass them by - it is to engage it only as pretty pictures, an entertaining diversion or a date night lark. At best we might engage it in some form of insipid comparative analysis - 'this village says ‘pop;' that village says ‘soda;' isn't that fascinating?” These photographs will offer much more.

They will show the divergences and convergences within and among perspectives. They will show that if you tweak an angle or slide to a new frame of reference, a problem may become an opportunity and a cost can transform to a benefit.

A closed door becomes an open window. A standoff morphs to a handshake. And so if one incorporates those perspectives or approaches into one's own mental tool kit, one's ability to process the world becomes enhanced.

If you see these photographs, and I hope you do, I encourage you to interact with them in this substantial and delightful meta-analytical way. They will illustrate not only two captivating neighborhoods. They - as any art worth its salt - will illustrate templates for understanding and connection.

' Patrick Muller is a visual artist living in Hills. Contact: patrickomuller@gmail.com.