Matt Welch was in travelling in Vietnam when he realized he was going about things all wrong.
He was was frantically running around and had “a list of about 50 things to do” each day. But in a vain attempt to see as much as possible, he was denying himself the ability to let anything sink in. Then one day, he was sitting in a market square and saw hundreds of children passing through. He was taken aback by the vibrant colors of their school uniforms, and got out his camera. He took 36 pictures — one roll of film — all standing in the same spot.
Years later, the technology has changed, and he’s planted himself in more locations. But as Welch and his wife Monica open Pacific Coast Gallery on Pier Avenue this weekend, the virtues of slowing down are evident in every wall.
“Sometimes, you just have to stand in one place and let the day go by,” he said.
Pacific Coast Gallery specializes in large-format, high-resolution landscapes. Familiar local lens-targets like the Hermosa and Manhattan piers are joined by shots from Hawaii, Lake Tahoe and the American West. Many of the photos are displayed at a large size in the gallery, but potential buyers can order them even larger. The gallery will deploy a technology that allows visitors to take a cell phone photo of a wall and send it to the gallery, who will then send back a rendering of the image at the size of the wall selected.
“Someone could get this one 15-feet long. It could be 30 feet if they had the wall space,” Welch said of an image of the Manhattan Beach Pier.
Welch can scale photos to unusually large sizes because of both technology and technique. He starts with a high-resolution camera, and he often “stitches” multiple photos into one. Many of the digital files for the images exceed 50,000 pixels. Discussing a shot taken in Monument Valley photo, he said the picture could be enlarged with enough clarity to make readable the license plate of a car, barely visible in the distance.
Welch’s photography career took off when he moved to Washington, D.C. for college. He was drawn to the nation’s capital by its renowned music scene. He started taking photos of local bands like Fugazi, and sold them to Spin and other music magazines. Welch is still a fan of the music, and actively seeks out photography exhibitions documenting punk’s adolescence. And while he loves the grainy look of the old analog shots, he enjoys being able to sip coffee and take his time with landscapes.
“You’d have to dodge people stage diving, boots coming at your head. Now, these volcanoes are not going to move,” he said, gesturing at shot from Guatemala.
Along with more traditional landscapes, Pacific Coast Gallery will feature several of Welch’s iconic “Flows,” arrangements of a dozen photos all taken from the same place, as in his trip to Vietnam. In addition to several taken in other countries, “The Strand Flow” occupies a prominent place in the gallery. Taken from a position on the Strand between First and Second streets in Hermosa, Welch captured 100,000 images over the course of 18 months. He and his wife began whittling them down, finally selecting and editing 12 slices of life, including a dog riding a skateboard and a man riding a Strand cruiser with a seat lit on fire.
Monica, who previously worked as a photo editor for high-fashion photographers in Italy, said that the selection process for the Flow projects involves creating some distance between her husband and the photos he snaps. For a previous project in Cartagena, Columbia, a tossed beer bottle exploded on the ground near Welch as he was shooting, coloring his perceptions of the images he captured. And it is also about representation. With the Strand Flow, she wanted to show that you could best “bring Hermosa Beach together in one picture” by staying put.
The Strand Flow has previously been on display at the Water and Wood and Human Nature shows organized by the Hermosa Beach Artist Collective, winning the best-in-show audience award each time.
Rafael McMaster, who helped organized the shows, called the Pacific Coast Gallery a “must see.”
“It’s rare that a photographer accomplishes what they did: making the viewer feel something while doing something so unique that it’s an ownable voice,” McMaster said.
Pacific Coast Gallery is at 205 Pier Ave., and will host its grand opening Saturday at 8 p.m.
