Dyer Arts Center hosts photo exhibition

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Photograph by Tom Policano: Flowers in Wellington, New Zealand.

I am very fond of saying, “Don’t crop,” and “More is better!”

—Tom Policano, photographer, RIT professor

It all clicked: He pulled the shutter on his electrical engineering degree to pursue a career in photography and the outcome is Dyer Arts Center’s newest exhibition, “Time & Again, Photography by Tom Policano.” The gallery at Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Institute for the Deaf will highlight more than 150 of Policano’s print media images from March 7 through April 4, with an opening reception scheduled from 5 to 8 p.m. March 15.

“I have always found the world to be a beautiful place,” Policano says. “ ‘Time & Again’ refers to the practice of seeing that is at the core of making images. The art of recognition and framing a connection in the magic of the moment involves a rush of emotions that never repeats and yet is always the same.

“Zillions of possibilities resolve when I release the shutter. The craft of presentation is my medium for communicating and sharing both the rush and the magic with others. I am insatiable in this pursuit.”

During his career, Policano received a New York State Council on the Arts Grant to complete “Slim Pickin’s,” a multi-image documentary of the state’s migrant workers. In the summer of 1973, he studied documentary photography, bookmaking and the zone system with Ansel Adams in Yosemite National Park.

Policano began working at RIT in 1977 as a professional staff photographer and later became associate professor in NTID’s Arts & Imaging Studies Department where he has taught for 31 years. He has been photographing since 1965 when he bought a Pentax SLR to celebrate going off to college for an engineering degree at University of Rochester. He subsequently earned an MFA in photography from the Visual Studies Workshop, State University of New York at Buffalo and a certificate in cross-disciplinary professional studies from RIT.

Policano has owned and experimented with more than 30 digital cameras and currently owns a Nikon 800E, a Sigma DP2 and the Sony NEX7 camera systems.

NTID Dyer Arts Center is located in RIT’s Lyndon B. Johnson Hall and gallery hours are from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 9:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday and 1 to 3 p.m. Saturday. For more information, visit the Dyer Arts Center website.