Click here to see the entire Events calendar
Go to month view.
Sign up to receive our newsletter.
CURRENT EVENTS
Virtual and In-Person Meetings
Virtual meetings are being held, unless specified as in-person or outings on our calendar.
Our weekly activities include tutorials, photo presentations, discussion forums, competitions and photo outings.
Although our regular meetings are reserved for member participation, they are open to the public. If you are interested in atttending a meeting, let us know via email at fortdinfo@gmail.com.
We continue to post industry news, free tutorials and articles about photography on our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/chicagophotoforum
Friday, May 8, 2025
7:30 PM CDT
SIGN UP FOR THIS FREE ZOOM PRESENTATION.
Fort Dearborn - Chicago Photo Forum Special Presentation
"Seating" is Limited
You need to register to get the link to the program.
About Nancy Ori
Nancy Ori obtained a BA degree in Fine Arts and an MS degree in Visual Communications. She worked 25 years for Ciba-Geigy and Novartis Pharmaceuticals as their in-house corporate photographer and manager of Video and Photography Services. She is a photographer, mixed media artist, author, exhibitor, curator, and instructor.
Ori is now owner of NJ Media Center in Berkeley Heights, NJ where she continues to do product, portrait, and food photography. She also enjoys teaching photography globally as well as exhibiting her fine art photographs. Nancy was taught by Ansel Adams and then affiliated for many years with the Ansel Adams Workshop in CA as a teaching assistant. She then opened her workshop company for photography and other mediums, inviting dozens of art teachers to join her in Cape May, NJ to teach workshops each spring for 18 years. Since 2001, she has run photography tours globally, taught many workshops on a wide variety of topics for museums, art centers and privately, as well as exhibited her work.
In 1994, she founded the New Jersey Photography Forum, which under Ori’s direction, has become the largest and most recognized group of fine art exhibiting photographers in the state. www.njphotoforum.com
Ori’s work has been widely collected and exhibited in museums & galleries throughout the globe & has been chosen to participate in numerous grant projects and fine art solo exhibits. Her work is in permanent museum and corporate collections internationally including the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Along with exhibiting her own work, Ori has curated and juried hundreds of exhibits for a wide variety of venues internationally.
www.nancyoriworkshops.com www.amazon.com/author/nancyori www.nancyorifineart.com
Nancy Ori
The culture today is dominated by scrolling fingers and instant imagery. We have image overload and short attention spans. How can an artist relate to the complexity of life today and stretch the traditional visual language into something more compelling? Mixed media might be a way to slow down the viewer to invite thought and more engagement. By combining artist materials, images, or techniques in a single work, an artist can create new interpretations and connections. It is a layering of ideas, histories, textures, and emotions. It is a process that turns layers of materials into conceptual storytelling.
A photograph might capture a moment in time with clarity and emotion, but what if that moment can become a longer narrative? What if the image needs to be more complicated or you even want to change the original meaning? Mixed media can open the door to those possibilities. It can allow the artist to treat the photograph not as a finished product, but as raw material that can inspire more.
Donations to not-for-profit Fort Dearborn-Chicago Photo Forum, providing these programs, are always welcome and are tax deductible:
Why Mixed Media?
by Nancy Ori
© Nancy Ori
© Nancy Ori
In mixed media, the list of materials and techniques is endless. With photography, certain materials pair especially well. I use watercolor, pastel, colored pencil and also create collages with layers of info. Ori loves painting on her photographs to manipulate them. The materials and process become part of the message.
This is how mixed media becomes conceptual. The term "conceptual" in art means the idea is central. It becomes more important than the technique. It's about what the work is saying. The layers and materials carry meaning. In this way, mixed media is uniquely suited to tell stories or ask questions. That’s what she means when she says mixed media is more conceptual than a single photograph. It engages the viewer intellectually and emotionally in a different way to see what might be beneath the surface.
.
.Although Ori thinks you can see her style in these works, mixed media is not a style. It is a planned assembly of ideas with a strategy in choosing the images, techniques, and materials. For artists, it offers the freedom to reimagine the elements and use of traditional materials along with new technology. For the viewer, it offers an invitation to slow down, look closer, process, and perhaps question the work. And in a world with way too many mediocre images, mixed media reminds us that we can play with our images to create works with depth and more meaning that are really saying something.
© Nancy Ori