Every picture tells a story

“Visual Truths: Sally Wiener Grotta & Niko J. Kallianiotis:” Jan. 6-28, AFA Gallery (514 Lackawanna Ave., Scranton). Opening reception Fri., Jan. 6, 6-9 p.m. Info: 570.969.1040, artistsforart.org, nikokallianiotis.com, pixels.smugmug.com

Maybe it takes a certain kind of fearlessness to be a photojournalist. After all, the profession requires one to go out into the world, approach strangers and basically request to forever capture their bleakest, happiest or most vulnerable moments in print, for the world to see.

In the cases of Sally Wiener Grotta, a freelance writer and photographer based in Pennsylvania, and Niko J. Kallianiotis, a former freelance photographer for The Times Leader pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree at New York City’s School of Visual Arts, their respective boldness seems to prove that point.

Kallianiotis has also been a freelancer for The New York Times since 2007, covering events in Pennsylvania and upstate New York, and he earned the position not by knowing the right people, but by taking the initiative while he was working at Watertown Daily News in New York.

“Through some people, I found the photo department (phone number) and I called, and I got lucky again because it’s very hard to pick up a phone and call The New York Times and find an editor that really wants to talk,” he said, laughing. “So I said, ‘I’m in Watertown, and I want to be a freelance photographer,’ and I sent her my website, and she liked my work and she sent me a contract … I just wanted to do it for the experience.”

Wiener Grotta has been equally driven, contributing to the likes of Popular Science and Woman’s Day and traveling the world for her freelance and personal projects.

“I traveled on assignment to all seven continents,” said Wiener Grotta. “I was in Antarctica three times in four years because I got obsessed with it. I couldn’t find that one definitive photograph of Antarctica.”

Wiener Grotta and Kallianiotis will be showing pieces in a joint exhibit entitled “Visual Truths” at AFA Gallery in Scranton through Saturday, Jan. 28 with an opening reception Friday, Jan. 6 from 6-9 p.m.

Different views from the lens

The title of the show, “Visual Truths,” is one that applies to each artist in a different but tangential way. Wiener Grotta and Kallianiotis have diverse styles and subjects, but their zeal and goals run side by side.

“It’s like we’re apples and oranges, but I think it’s going to be really good that way. There is zero competition between the two of us,” Wiener Grotta said, laughing. “I think we’ll supplement each other. I have a very humanist leaning, as does he, so I think that’s important, and we are both seeking our own personal truths in our photography.”

For Kallianiotis, who originally hails from Greece, the title of the exhibit correlates directly with the essence of his work.

“In my photojournalism background, I don’t deal with fictional photography or conceptual work,” he said. “I’m interested in capturing human behavior, I’m interested in the human form, people’s reactions … I don’t tell them what to do. I don’t set up the situation, I record it as it unfolds.”

Whereas Kallianiotis is a self-described street photographer, Wiener Grotta, known for her “American Hands” project, which focuses on the work of traditional artisans, approaches her portraits from a different angle. She develops an even deeper relationship with her subjects.

“It’s my view, it’s my personal interaction with what I’m experiencing, and I’m trying to help others experience it,” she stated. “When it’s a photograph of another person, it is very much a collaboration. I do not do street photography, I do photography in which I’ve developed a relationship with my subject. And to me, it’s a successful photo shoot if the camera lens virtually disappears and it’s just the two of us relating to each other.”

Truth of the matter

The link between Wiener Grotta and Kallianiotis seems to be that storytelling aspect, the idea that they’re capturing these moments and relaying them to others through the scope of their lenses.

Kallianiotis especially does not like being limited by his own specifications, and explained that with this upcoming exhibit, his black-and-white photos fit into a broad definition, rather than one linear tale.

“If I go out and say, ‘I’m going to do this project, this is my concept,’ I find myself being fabricated, and I’m not free to do other stuff,” he explained. “I’m kind of stuck in this little world that I have to do this project on this particular subject. You can say, ‘Yeah, it’s broad, it’s very wide,’ but I like it that way because it’s about the photograph, and I try to make every single photograph tell its own story.”

In the same vein, Wiener Grotta feels that those photos she has selected fit within one certain sentiment.

“I find that my photography comes from a place within me that finds a great deal of wonder in the world and other people, in shapes, in light, in shadow, in the experience of being within this world,” she explained. “And there are different feelings I have within this wonder, and all of the pictures in this exhibit go toward this one left-angled one … they do have a continuity to me. When we’re talking about visual truths, it is my personal visual truth.”

For Kallianiotis, there is the same feeling of continuity without obvious similarity.

“It’s not like a dedicated body of work,” he explained, pointing out that most of his pieces in the show were taken either in Scranton or Greece. “My goal eventually is to make a project of street life in America and street life in Greece, but that will take some time.”

Wiener Grotta noted that her pieces, as is the case with Kallianiotis, came from personal projects, not professional work.

“My husband and I, he’s a writer and I’m a writer and photographer, and we have traveled all over the world on assignment for major glossy magazines, had a blast, and it was always doing other people’s truths,” she said. “And I also was doing a lot of nonfiction, again, it’s other people’s truths. I now tend toward my fiction and my fine-art photography, because it’s time for me to express my own truths.”

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