Magic Moments: Photographer show covers 29 years of them

When you’ve had a career as long, varied and trailblazing as Vincent Versace has it’s tough to put together a best-of exhibition.

The photographer wasn’t having an easy time of it when we contacted him earlier this week at his studio in Los Angeles, where he was combing through 29 years worth of images on his 96 terabyte server for his exhibition, which is opening Tuesday at Palm Beach Photographic Centre.

“I am chained to the printer,” he said.

Versace will receive the center’s FOTOmentor Award recognizing lifetime achievement during its 24th FOTOfusion festival, held Monday through Saturday at its headquarters in downtown West Palm Beach and other sites. He joins a list that includes photographers such as Gordon Parks, Sebastiao Salgado and David Hume Kennerly.

That hasn’t made Versace’s task any easier.

“When you look at the list of photographers who have won this award, it’s a wee bit intimidating,” he said.

Many would say Versace can hold his own in such company. Back in the early 1990s, he was Nikon’s first non-staff tester for its digital cameras. He played the same role for Epson’s printers.

He’s one of Nikon’s ambassadors, a group the company regards as the “top photography artists and visual storytellers of our generation.”

He’s even had an award named after him — the National Association of Photoshop Professionals’ Vincent Versace Award for Digital Photography Excellence.

The photographer will attend several public events and teach during FOTOfusion. A member of the center’s board, he’s been involved with the organization since the late 1990s.

“There are very few photographers who can do everything and do it amazingly well,” said Fatima NeJame, president and chief executive officer. “He can.”

When it comes to photography he’s willing to try just about anything. As a digital pioneer, he’s had plenty of practice with pushing the envelope.

“I started with this when nobody knew anything,” he said. “We were all figuring it out together.”

Versace, 60, was introduced to photography by his wedding photographer uncle when Versace was 7.

The exhibition, which will include about 200 images, won’t reach back that far, but it will cover his years as a digital photographer.

It will include portraits, landscapes, cityscapes, still lifes and more from around the world and feature color, black and white, and infrared photography.

“These are the pictures that I really like and have meaning for me,” Versace said.

He maintains he doesn’t take pictures, they take him.

The images in the show are “moments in my life when I happened to be standing in front of something when something wonderful happened,” he said.

Like the time he was on assignment for American Photo magazine in Alaska photographing the fjords from a inflatable outboard motorboat.

He captured a stunning photo of the fog-shrouded cliffs with a bird sailing over the water. But at the time “I really wasn't paying attention to the bird,” he said. “I was more about paying attention to not falling into the water.”

Or the day he ducked into a cafe to escape a downpour in Vietnam. He was playing with the camera’s new live view feature when he spotted two children savoring a snack. “Magic happened,” he said.

A consultant for Nikon, Epson, Adobe, Nik and other companies, Versace is a master of photographic tech.

He sees it as the modern equivalent of the old-fashioned darkroom.

In his fine art work “my job is to show you how it felt to be standing there when I shot the picture and to remove what doesn’t belong there in a way that is true to that experience,” he said.

One of his techniques is to seamlessly fuse multiple photographs into a single image, which enables him to have elements in focus that wouldn’t be otherwise because of the limitations of how cameras focus.

Technical wizardry aside “what you get from meeting Vincent or even just seeing his work is the earnest joy of photography,” said Scott Mc Kiernan, head of Zuma Press and co-organizer with NeJame of FOTOfusion.

Perhaps that explains why Versace titled his show Postcards from the Vacation that is my Life.

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jsjostrom@pbdailynews.com