While cameras have always held a certain aesthetic appeal — from the long bellowed models at the dawn of the 20th century to the sleek, pocket-sized styles of today — their true beauty most often comes from the magnificent photos they take, the moments they capture.
Retired anesthesiologist John Shuptrine has found a way to turn the creative instrument into a work of art itself with his one-of-a-kind wooden camera sculptures.
"It is sculptural in a really fun and whimsical way," says Stefanie Fedor, executive director of the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, which will feature Shuptrine's work in its juried Craft + Design show next weekend.
"But … also, because he's building these wood sculptures with real, found camera parts … he's also looking pretty closely at his main instrument that he uses as a photographer."
+4John Shuptrine's mixed media camera sculptures, photographed on Wednesday, Nov. 1.
Jay Westcott/The News & Advance***
Shuptrine has considered himself a photographer since he was 12 years old and picked up his first Kodak Brownie.
"A good friend of mine showed me how to make a print in the dark room," recalls Shuptrine, who worked in private practice for almost 30 years at Lynchburg General Hospital. "I'll never forget that moment when the white paper turned to a black and white image before my eyes. I was stunned."
Shuptrine worked primarily in black-and-white with field cameras using film, though he converted to digital over the years.
Despite being mostly self-taught, save for the occasional master class, his work was published in fine-art photography magazine Black & White's annual contest edition in 2008 and 2009, where he received first and second place, respectively.
He's also shown his photographs in numerous exhibits throughout Lynchburg, including several Academy Center of the Arts' juried photography shows and a 2014 exhibit in the Academy Gallery, says Ted Batt, the Academy's director of visual arts. Some of his work also is included in the Academy's current Cash & Carry Sale, which runs through Dec. 21.
The 2014 show was presented by the group WWAD, a foursome of medical professionals from the Lynchburg area, including Shuptrine, who traveled annually to photograph the country's national parks. The acronym stands for "What Would Ansel Do," referencing well-known photographer Ansel Adams.
"He [used] the large-format camera, where, like Ansel Adams, he's got this big wooden tripod and this big wooden camera with a long bellows," says retired plastic surgeon Sam Fuller, a member of the group who now lives in Richmond.
Shuptrine, Fuller says, looked like a photographer of old as he extended the accordion-like bellows — a folding box of pleated material that creates a lightproof seal between the lens and the film and allows for focusing — and ducked his head beneath the attached drape.
"His photographs are just incredible. And like Ansel Adams, when he would go off somewhere and he would carry 10 plates with him, John would have a certain number of plates whereas the rest of us … could shoot as many pictures as you wanted to."
Photography, says Shuptrine, helped him manage the stress of his work as an anesthesiologist. Shooting with a field camera also ensured he slowed down and enjoyed every moment fully, something that is absent with the fast-paced nature of medicine.
Both anesthesiology and photography require intense focus and an ability to stay in the moment, he says.
The same is true of his wooden camera sculptures.
"There's a real interest in pattern and design," Batt says when asked what Shuptrine's photography and sculpture have in common. "... There's definitely an attention to line and composition."
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Broken cameras lay in heaps, their shells split open and metal innards dissected and organized into stacked piles of tiny, gleaming gears, memory boards and dials that control shutter speed and aperture.
Nearby, Shuptrine reaches into a pile, pulling out differently sized camera lenses, and brings them toward the prone wooden form resting on his workspace.
He switches them out one by one.
A large silver lens he got off a video camera. A fat framed lens with its own metal backing. A longer narrow one that juts several inches out from the yellow-and purple-toned wood, like something off a spaceship in a sci-fi film.
The lens "defines a lot," he says. "A big part of the look is the glass."
Shuptrine says the idea for his wooden cameras might have begun with his brother-in-law's art-deco-inspired Kodak Bantam Special. The popular camera from the '30s and '40s had a black-and-white striped pattern on its enameled aluminum body, which reminded him of wooden strips he had worked with previously when making household objects, like tables.
All he knows for sure is when he retired in January of 2016, he began filling his free time by gluing strips of wood together, shaping them into cameras and attaching old mechanical parts — or the bling as he calls it — to their surfaces.
"For a while, I would wake up in the morning with the shape of a camera in my head and I would have to go out and create that shape," he says. "And then I had a lot of old cameras, beat up stuff, and I started to take them apart and use them."
Now, he's always searching for old cameras to use in his art, buying them damaged or broken from Ebay and accepting donations of old models from friends. Ninety-nine percent of the finishings come from internal or external camera parts.
He layers gears on top of dials, placing them next to bulky flashes and compartments that open on hinges to reveal a hidden lens. He bends and shapes the wood for hand-made tripods using molds he creates from scratch.
"There's skill and talent in how he shapes the wood, sculpts the wood," Batt says. "… If you take away the camera parts, it's still a pretty amazing piece of wood that he's using. You add these camera parts and that makes it really fun."
Shuptrine's first sculpture featured only one type of wood and a single, large lens. Since then, the art pieces have evolved in terms of wood type, size and embellishments.
Much like he once combined chemicals in his basement darkroom to process a photo, he now mixes exotic woods, creating striped or checked patterns for the camera's body. Instead of polishing the sharp lines of an image in Photoshop, he smoothes the wood into rounded edges or triangular points to accompany the more classic, boxy camera body shapes.
Right now, he's working on layering glass lenses to create an altogether new effect similar to how he experiments with alternative photo processing techniques.
Shuptrine models some of his sculptures on real, historical cameras, like the Argus C3 and the No. 1A Autographic Kodak Junior, complete with the folding bellows. Others develop out of pure fantasy.
"In the end, if you look at the history of photography and the history of the technology, the cameras, virtually any shape, size [and] configuration has existed in real form," Shuptrine says.
While lens caps may open and viewfinders may still pick up light and color, Shuptrine emphasizes the sculptures are made of solid wood and therefore do not work.
"It's a real dichotomy because you want to turn it around and use it," Batt says. "It's got all the pieces. You want to flick the shutter and load it with film, but you can't."
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Though he has only been making his camera sculptures for less than two years, Shuptrine's pieces have already garnered attention in the art community. His fellow photographers, Fuller included, have commented on the whimsical and mysterious nature of the sculptures.
"For those of us interested in photography, they're all clever," Fuller says. "Just very interesting to look at, pick up and hold."
The work has shown in exhibits in Richmond and Maryland; one of his sculptures also took Best in Show in the Academy's National Juried Art Show in April.
When Shuptrine joins more than 100 other artists chosen from across the country to participate in Craft + Design in Richmond, he will have the opportunity to earn another first place finish.
"Collectors are interested in wood right now. It's a really hot medium," says Fedor. "… John's work being small and being [these] highly whimsical objects are highly collectable."
For the photographer-turned-sculptor, the joy lies in the process of combining nature and industry into an entirely new creation.
"It's fabulous [that] I can go and spend four or five, six hours … [in the wood shop]. For those three to five hours, I lose track of time," Shuptrine says. "There's nothing quite like that when you can be in a position to let your mind go."
