Naomi Rubin

In July Photo Show at BU

By Susie Davidson

Advocate Correspondent

BOSTON - The Members’ Show at BU’s Photographic Resource Center, 602 Commonwealth Ave. in Boston (617-353-0700) from July 5-26 will include work by Naomi Rubin, a Brandeis grad from Princeton, New Jersey, with the opening reception July 11 from 5:30-7:30.

Two of her photos are also on view through mid-July, in conjunction with the HRC show, at Passim, 47 Palmer St. in Harvard Square; one, called “the Moment,” is her self-professed signature piece.

“I'm hoping that an audience of photographers will be

likelier than most,” she says regarding this show, ‘(in)Animate Subjects: Diverse Views,’ “to share my curiosity about the expressive range offered to a subject (doll, person, or other) by this mix of lowly, lovely techniques and tools such as an office-type photocopying machine, a toy camera from the 1950s, and an Altoids tin.”

Rubin has showed, and sold, her work, including seven pieces at her second solo show. Though her main tool is the 35mm camera, which she says is “good for the real world,” she has recently been focusing on xerography, photograms, and pinhole photography as well.

“I'm from lovely, liberal Princeton, NJ, described by New

Jersey Magazine as ‘where G-d Himself would live if only He

had the money (not that we did!),” she recalls. She attended Sunday classes at the Princeton Jewish Center, and as it is her mother's first language, took a class in Yiddish there as well. But art, to the most minute detail, was definitely the thing.

“I spent many hundreds of hours hunched over,” she says, “drawing all these tiny microcosmic societies, sort of like little dollhouse villages on paper, with a scale of about five and a half feet to an inch.

“The town generally smiles on arts and culture, and happily it had a decent percentage of Jews, about 10 percent, though most were Reform – in fact, I never saw the Orthodox until I moved here.

Following graduation from Brandeis with a double

major in English/Sociology, “I stayed on in Boston as so many grads do, and then followed in my mother's footsteps to a school library job.”

While observing the sun striking buildings one day in a parking lot, Rubin realized that “the outside world was a lot more open and interesting than the limited worlds I used to make up and draw, but it's in flux. As a bit of an antidote to the alarmingly fleeting nature of everything, I realized I wanted to get a camera so I could freeze the occasional moment and keep it.”

She took two photography courses at Emerson College in the 80s, and got darkroom privileges. For the past ten years, she has worked at the O’Neill Library at Boston in the Preservation Department and presently, has a black and white darkroom set up in her home basement to indulge her pictorial passion.