Review

"Fingers through the Trees", Photographic Print.

Bettse Folsom
Captured Moments

10 a.m.-4 p.m.

Mr. and Mrs. F.L. Schlagle Library
4051 West Drive
Wyandotte County Lake Park
Kansas City, KS
913.299.2384

Hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday-Friday and Third Saturdays.
Runs through: Dec. 18.

Artist's site: http://www.bettsefolsom.com
Gallery site: http://www.kckpl.org/FINEARTS/exhibits.htm

Don't tell anyone, but there's another place you can go to see art on a daily basis -- or close to it. It's as easy as picking up a newspaper.

Granted, a lot of the photography there is of the purely illustrative sort: Grip-and-grins for charity, columnists' mug shots and the like. But there is a good deal of art in true photojournalism -- which, as it happens, is one of Bettse Folsom's two freelance fields, writing being the other.

Folsom's visual work has augmented all manner of articles in a wide variety of regional publications ... and over the span of her career, she has assembled a collection of images that make up Captured Moments, Folsom's traveling collection of art photography.

The photos have shown at the Alcott Arts Center and various branches of the Kansas City, Kansas Public Library. The current tour stop: the Mr. and Mrs. F.L. Schlagle Library and Environmental Learning Center in Wyandotte County Lake Park, where Folsom's work will be on display until mid-December.

The show's premise cuts to the center of the place where art and photojournalism meet:

No moment will ever be the same again in exactly the same way, Folsom writes. No preparation is ever going to reproduce the opportunity to find something this unique again.

In other words, sometimes you get just once chance at the shot ... and that's just as true for seemingly static pieces as for those captured at the sometimes-dizzying speed of breaking news.

Fingers through the Trees, the photograph atop this post, radiates tranquility. But it also captures a moment of flux. Those shafts of light, piercing through the canopy, were different in the second before Folsom pressed the shutter -- and in the second after. Had she waited even the span of a breath to shoot, the final result would not be the same.

There's an artistic lesson there, obviously, but a larger life application as well.

Sometimes, we get only one chance to capture a moment -- a glance, a greeting, a reconciliation -- before it's gone.

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