PAM WYLIE: Okay, everyone has seen “Antiques Roadshow” and everyone wants to find a treasure in one's attic. But what if YOU are the treasure you find? Sedona Callahan had that experience. She reached into her metaphorical attic about 5 years ago and there it was: her own talent -- photography!
SEDONA CALLAHAN: I have been kind of dabbling in it before that but one of the founders of the Park Silly Sunday Market invited me to have a booth at the market and, with a lot of trepidation, I took her up on the offer and went to the market with an old red nylon canopy which cast a red glow over everything that I had. Very inexperienced, I didn't know how to market it, I didn't know what to do.
PAM: Learning curve on everything.
SEDONA: Learning curve on everything, but while I was there I saw two women walking down the street. They were across the street on the sidewalk but I saw them look over at my booth. One of them pointed into the booth and I could read her lips and she said, “Wow!” They didn't come into the booth. They didn't buy anything but it was just what I needed to boost my confidence up just a little bit more.
PAM: so you've been taking pictures all these years and you had no idea that there was a Wow factor already with them?
SEDONA: I knew that I liked them. My friends like them. I had hoped to do something with them at some point but I have been in education for many years and then in journalism for many years. They always were on the back shelf and I was just beginning to think that maybe I could spend a little more time with photography, make more of it and then I just had this opportunity when I was approached by Park Silly Sunday Market.
PAM WYLIE: Sedona’s dad was an amateur photographer. She spent time in the darkroom as a child, fell in love with the magic of photography at age four, took courses in it over the years. Her educational background was in anthropology, but her anthropology and education merged into one focus…
SEDONA: I consider myself first a storyteller and I do that both with words and with photographs. I have written for a newspaper for many years, a couple of newspapers. I wrote for Park City Magazine as a freelancer for many years and I would tell stories with my words but I also try to tell stories with my pictures as well.
PAM: I’m looking at Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde. Very nice!
SEDONA: That picture was actually taken over 30 years ago.
PAM: And then there’s Ruins of America Trading Post.
SEDONA: That’s down near Cortez, Colorado and that particular photograph, I remember that I was attracted to the fact that it had “Open for business” and “Closed for business” signs as well as “For sale” signs. Nobody was around. There just seemed to be such a conflict going on there but it attracted me.
PAM: Sedoda is that her booth as much as possible. There's a reason for that.
SEDONA: Somebody explained to me that when people are buying art, a lot of times people who are not artistic themselves -- maybe they're accountants, maybe they're attorneys, if they have other skills but not necessarily artistic skills but they're interested in art -- and when they come into the booth and they admire your work, they want to meet the artist, they want to know what goes into that particular piece, so they want to make a personal contact with the person who created it. Then, when they take it back to their office or back to their home, they can say the photographer told me this about this.
PAM: In fall, winter, and spring, Sedona is out taking pictures. In summer, she sells them. Her art is hanging at Silver Star Cafe, she has cards at No Place Like Home so she's getting around, but a really big event happened this last spring.
SEDONA: I was featured at a gallery in Salt Lake City this spring. It was a huge event for me and is still ongoing. I was given the entire gallery at Mestizo which is the sort of Ground Central for the Chicano and Mexican Americans community. I had a collection of photographs that I took many years ago of street murals in East Los Angeles during the height of the Chicano movement and since then most of those murals are gone but I lugged around my collection of photographs all those years and Mestizo Gallery was interested in seeing those. When they saw them, they invited me to put up as much of the collection as would fit in the gallery so I had the whole gallery for the full month of March. At the same, I put together a book of those photographs and many more that didn't make it into the gallery. The sales were pretty good; I kept my prices as low as I possibly could so there were many sales but what has come out of that is that this exhibit has attracted the attention of the UCLA Chicano studies and research department and they are interested in republishing my book and getting those images into their archives. The word I got back from the director of that program was that the collection was “stunning”!
PAM: Sedona has a website: SedonaCallahanPhotographer. Her Facebook page is Sedona Callahan Photography. And for the Kimball Arts Festival this weekend, look for Sedona’s orange and red banner at booth number 97. Pretty nifty for Sedona to find her own talent after all these years.
So ... what's in your attic?
Pam Powell is an author, playwright and radio personality living in Springfield, OR. Connect with her on Linked In.
© 2014 Pam Wylie Powell