“A Girl, A Guy & Their f-Stops” opens at High Street Gallery

“A Girl, A Guy & Their f-Stops,” a new gallery exhibition at the High Street Gallery, chronicles the cross country road trip of two Rowan University students, Stephanie Capolupo and Taylor Galloway, through photography.

Capolupo and Galloway both traveled through many of the same locations, although they did not actually go together. According to Capolupo, her photographs were taken between two cross-country trips, whereas Galloway’s were from a cross-country trip he took last summer. Another difference was that Capolupo took her trip through the program “Rowan Discovers the American West” and that Galloway “just went to go.”

Capolupo shot her photos with a Canon digital SLR ad a film SLR camera to document what she saw and how she saw it. Her favorite photograph, “The Hangar,” was a row of vibrant surfboards, nonchalantly slouched against each other in front of a beach scene.

“We just bring our cameras everywhere,” Capolupo said. “It’s in us as photographers to always have the camera with you.”

Another of Capolupo’s photographs, “Barrels to the Top,” depicted several 50-gallon drums piled over each other. The black and white photo had a nice balance of darks and lights. The sky was slightly blown out, which made the tree trunks more visible and washed out the smaller branches that would otherwise clutter the photograph.

Tony Wanschura, a senior art major, said that he really enjoyed the compositions because some of the works were very clean and architectural. It was a nice contrast to the other pieces in the gallery, which showed mostly decaying structures.

“It’s a nice balance,” Wanschura said. “In all the works, they seem to have ones very smooth and the others very sharp and rigid and one’s black and white and one’s color. It’s very nice to see these pieces together in one gallery.”

Galloway’s “Gates to Heaven” was a series of three separate parts, stacked vertically over each other. Both the top and bottom were an identical photo of a vivid, blue sky. In the middle was a photo of a cell block inside the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. The Penitentiary had an eerie darkness broken by the occasional ray of light, which made the shadows stand out even more in contrast to the radiant sky.

Gerald Williams, an adjunct professor who teaches the photojournalism course that is run through the Rowan Art Department, found the images to be both interesting and graphic, and loved the subtle colors.

“It’s really beautiful,” Williams said. “I like Taylor’s stuff, especially [of] Eastern State Penitentiary. I like his use of lines.

“He really found his calling. He wanted to be a photographer; I think he started out as an English major.”

“A Girl, A Guy & Their f-Stops” will run at High Street Gallery until March 6. The gallery hours are Wednesday to Friday from 3:30 p.m. until 7 p.m. and Saturdays from noon until 4:30 p.m.