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 Gywenn Gaittins
Gywenn Gaittins has been shooting on and off for more than ten years, but it wasn’t until she started a “pet nanny” business that her newest work took shape. “I spend a lot of time looking down as I walk the dogs,” says the former graphic designer and martial arts instructor. “And I realized how much beauty and color there is in the road.” For Gaittens, “pavement, sidewalks, and grassy trails have become my obsession,” one supported by lab maven Pam Perkins-Frederick at Bucks County Community College, where Gaittans is majoring in fire science. “People are always coming up to me and asking if I’m feeling okay because I’m taking a picture of the ground,” says the photographer, who shoots with a Canon EOS 30D. “Then I show them the picture on the LCD, and they smile and tell me they would never have looked twice if I hadn’t shown them the art in it.”.
—Russell Hart
 Rachel Phillips
The summer before her senior year at Skidmore College, Rachel Phillips took a photo class at Foothill College near her hometown of San Francisco—and fell in love. In her senior year at Skidmore’s Saratoga Springs, New York, campus, she incorporated the medium into her creative writing, and she has continued to take workshops at Foothill since graduating. Her hand-colored image of San Francisco’s Chinatown, created by applying photo oils to a conventional black-and-white print, was inspired by workshop teacher Brigitte Carnochan. “Painting” her images allowed Phillips to clarify and control Chinatown’s visual jumble while retaining a vibrant palette. The artist says she wanted to create the kind of tension and anticipation she sees in Edward Hopper’s paintings, building on his idea of “cities as stage sets for the play of human action.”
—Miki Johnson
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