SEE THIS NOW: Megan Karson’s Wanderbound

Who looks forward to being shown an album of travel photos — especially one purporting to show a year’s worth of adventures?

As a rule, nobody does. But when Megan Karson is the roving photographer, you don’t have to put on a fake smile while you think of excuses for leaving before she runs out of pages. The photos that make up her exhibition Wanderbound — on display at the recently opened Night Blooms Darkroom and Book Store (529 Southwest Boulevard) — are worth seeing and savoring. These are shots by someone aiming to capture beauty, not Instagram likes. Karson has an eye for the perfect moment, and she has a talent for traditional photogrpahy’s demanding processes.

Let’s talk about iPhones for a minute. This most pervasive and useful tool of modern photography — as well as its most disruptive — cameos in Wanderbound almost every time a human is somewhere in the background of a shot. Karson neither crops out nor centers the ubiquitous device, instead using its presence to quietly underscore her dedication to 35mm film.  A shot in which a man in the background sits in a Venetian gondola and uses his smartphone to photograph an event in the foreground allows Karson to warp time a little, and to challenge the we’re-all-photographers-now norm. We look at her photo and we pause in solitary reflection, looking at the canal in a way the man with his iPhone probably did not.

Most of the shots offer compositional satisfactions of a high order: strong balance, with an alert sense of black and white as counterweights and a knack for capturing the harmony between the natural world and how humans observe or penetrate it. “Many Glacier,” a shot of a lone moose standing in a lake against a background of hazy mountains and trees, is perfectly lonely. Not every wild spirit is happy to be alone.

Karson’s shot of Notre Dame’s interior is one of the most splendid of this series. One piece of the compositional grid is broken by an open window and the hot white light burning through. Somehow, this stained glass is more beautiful in gray scale; the removal of color allows the image to feel closer to art than to the institution of religion. Depicting such a recognizable icon — such a frankly easy subject — without succumbing to cliche is difficult to do. But Karson’s shot, by setting aside reverence for the opulent rainbow of the church interior in favor of pattern and contrast, manages to be unexpected and subtle.

The works in Wanderbound neatly fit the well-traveled atmosphere of Night Blooms. Although the bookstore is still in its first year, the diversity of material on the shelves here comes from the owners’ life of personal collecting. It’s a small luxury to view artwork in a space where a book on Weston and Stieglitz awaits your perusal three feet away.

With such early masters of her medium in mind, I asked Karson about her process. She said black-and-white film feels raw to her, an organic alternative to the obsessive click-and-delete of digital methods. “You have limited moments to capture — 12 in this case,” she told me. “It makes each photograph feel more special, and it makes me pay attention.”

It’s not convenient, of course, carrying her photography gear abroad in luggage or slinging it over her shoulders while backpacking. “It takes up about half the bag,” she said, forcing her to forgo items she’d otherwise travel with. But among the benefits, she added, is that “shooting film … really opens up a conversation when people see [me with the camera].”

You don’t see Karson’s camera in her photos, as you do the iPhones of fellow travelers seeking their own photo-album souvenirs, but the camera as object is a unifying topic in Wanderbound. Her art is about an old-fashioned way of documenting an old-fashioned spirit of travel. It’s about setting aside the phone, and it’s about taking time.

Megan Karson
Wanderbound
Through April 30 at Night Blooms Darkroom and Book Store, 529 Southwest Boulevard, facebook.com/nightbloomskc