Beloved local photographer Ken Goss returns to the Gifford Medical Center art gallery March 28 through May 30 with an eclectic mix of landscapes, still life, fine art and portraits.
The images are a combination of film and digital work and build upon his decades of experience in photography.
Goss’s first introduction to photography was in high school. He worked in a commercial studio and a photo laboratory. The majority of his photography training then came during his military career.
“After I enlisted in the Marine Corps, I went through naval photo school in Pensacola, Fla., for aerial reconnaissance and photo interpretation,” Goss says. “Two years later I went through advanced 70 mm photo school at the naval air station in Jacksonville, Fla.”
After the military, Goss went on to work in both freelance photography and in a commercial studio for a short time. The bulk of his career, though, was in precision aerial photography, topographic mapping and aerial survey first with Lockwood, Kessler and Bartlett, a civil engineering company on Long Island, N.Y.. He spent 10 years with the company and then started his own business, Aerial Photo and Survey Corp., also on Long Island, for more than 30 years.
Along the way he has had some remarkable accomplishments.
He’s developed, designed and flight-tested aerial photographic systems, technology and techniques, and even assisted the nation’s space program. He helped develop applied aerial photographic techniques for use in flight training simulators under contract to NASA and was a team member in the development of the original “Luna model” in the Apollo program. He even aided in the formulation of acceptable operating techniques in the then-new technology of “orthophotography,” he says, and was a research contributor to Time-Life series publications on photographic technology.
Goss retired in the mid-1990s and moved to Vermont in 2003.
Since he’s worked as the chair of the Chandler Art Gallery from 2006 to 2008, has taught the basics of black and white photography at the White River Craft Center since 2009 and shown his works around the region.
“Now being again able to pursue photography as an ‘art’ form, I try to take what I feel in my heart or in spirit about a subject, capture it in film and print in such a manner to give the viewer the same feeling,” Goss says. “This transference of feelings, if successful, gives me all the satisfaction of the art that I need.”
See Goss’s art in the Gifford Gallery, located just inside the hospital’s main entrance at 44 S. Main St. (Route 12) in Randolph. Call Gifford at (802) 728-7000 or Volunteer Coordinator Julie Fischer at (802) 728-2324 for more information.
