'Third Dimension Images' puts you in the picture

It's 6:50 p.m., and the Manitou Springs laundromat radiates the moody green and yellow light of postcards and old movies. There are two cars in the parking lot and no one inside. Still, you can hear machines working. Now and again, the "chugchugchug" of a busy washer escapes onto the quiet street.

"This is just the kind of laundromat I used to go to with my mother when I was a kid," says Kathleen McFadden, who leans into her white '66 Olds to retrieve a battery for a camera she calls the Big Daddy.

The 8-pound camera is unassuming - a lens and a stack of black boxes on top of a small digital screen. There's no name on the body or on the specially padded plastic case she keeps it in. In spite of the low profile, Big Daddy is to the standard point-and-shoot what the Hubble is to your kid's telescope.

As she tries to piece together the battery and the body, she hisses under her breath. "Little beastie."

Nothing is easy about this camera.

That suits McFadden just fine. It's frustrating, of course, but she's got patience and a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of the mechanics of the medium - which makes her something of an anomaly in this immediate-gratification world. She'll wait for film to be processed. She'll explore the mysteries of Big Daddy and her cadre of classic cameras, most of which are older than she is. She processes and prints just about everything she does.

And then there's her big project. Some time after buying Big Daddy in 2006, she discovered that if she bent some of the 180-degree images it produces just so, viewers feel as if they'd been propelled into the picture.

She's been working on "Third Dimension Images" ever since.

"It's the first new idea in photography since digital," says McFadden, her face sunny like a Disney daisy. "It's like a View-Master without the apparatus."

But pursuing a dream is hardly easy, and for McFadden, the struggle to realize her vision goes on.

And perhaps that's why you shouldn't bother asking about the camera, the frames, her printing or, really, any detail of "Third Dimension Images." The 41-year-old Amarillo native, who owns the Range Gallery in Manitou Springs, is going to keep the details to herself as long as she can.

The cameras

Liberated from their bags, about 25 cameras and almost a dozen lenses swallow one corner of the long, rough-hewn wood table in McFadden's dining room. Five Nikons of various vintages, an Argus C3, a Zeiss Ikon, a Kodak Brownie, a Rollieflex twin lens, a Graflex and a tiny Olympus point-and-shoot.

Under the table, Big Daddy rests in its brown case. It's the newest infatuation, but not her only love. She uses all her cameras.

As she talks about the cameras, she'll give you a tour of their history, of the optics, of their general characteristics, tossing out model numbers and brand names as if they were names of cars.

She picks up her 1953 Leica,, a chrome camera that looks as if it might have been used in Cold War espionage.

"There's just something about this camera that works for me," says McFadden, turning it over in her hands. "It's like an old friend."

First, though, it was a Kodak Instamatic 110. She was 8. Others came, and she shot photos for her high school newspaper and later, at Amarillo College, where she received a two-year degree in journalism, and then at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she got a bachelor's in environmental studies.

She never took a class in photography. "I guess I never had confidence in my personal vision, my creativity," say McFadden, whose Texas upbringing occasionally twists words into Southern patois.

Despite the degrees, McFadden returned to photography, working in a camera store. That, she says, is where she really learned about photography. Eventually she opened a camera store in San Luis Obispo, Calif., with a friend.

She left the business in 2007. Like independent bookstores, the little neighborhood camera shop was a thing of the past.

The pictures

If you're familiar with McFadden's work at all, you probably know her quirky images of shopping carts, empty houses, street signs, sinuous oak trees, table settings and cowboys in diners. Many feel strangely tense, as if something had just happened. Others feel dreamily nostalgic.

"One of my tourists described my style as Americana," she says, "and I liked that."

And with each image, she makes an unusual commitment in a world where digital images are fast, abundant and eminently erasable - not just to the image she's chosen or the moment in time, but to giving up one more frame on one more roll of film in the vegetable bin in her refrigerator. So McFadden is careful and all about control, even after pressing the button: She processes and prints almost all her work. She doesn't do digital.

Not even with the scapel-sharp "Third Dimension Images," which greet customers as they walk into her 936-square-foot gallery and framing shop. In contrast to most of her work, these are simply breathtaking, the kinds of vistas that make memories.

This is someone who understands photography like a physicist understands two-plus-two. She's a connoisseur, a celebrant, a photographic explorer.

"It's cool," she says of the work she's produced with the $11,000 Big Daddy ("Yeah, it cost more than my car.") "But there have been so many obstacles in doing this."

Sure, the effect created by the curved image is seductive, but how do you display it? While wood might succumb to the bowed shape, glass isn't so willing. How do you protect the surface without making it look like a poster? And how do you mount it, especially if you want to put it where it makes the most sense, in a corner?

She went through many designs before settling on the current hardware.

And the camera, which came with a badly translated instruction book and often defies conventional logic, is an ongoing exercise in educated guesses, she says.

"You know, just taking a picture and bending it, that's cool. But I can't necessarily do it every single time. Sometimes I curve the picture and it's just a curved picture."

She frowns. It's obviously a point of frustration.

"If you can't do it again, what's the point?"

And then there's the fact that people seem to want a piece of her discovery.

"They ask about the camera, the lenses," she says. "Lots of people who come into the gallery are professional photographers. They think they can do it."

This is where McFadden jumps the tracks a bit: She won't share any details, not even the brand name of the camera, because she wants to maintain complete dominion over the process.

There's certainly potential here, not the least of which is its newness to the market. Some of her resistance, though, may be buried in the conflicted sense of ownership many photographers have: Is it the machine or the mechanic that makes the art?

"But you know, even with this exact same setup and shot, a picture put in one of these frames, it's still my image," she says slowly. "Like the laundromat. That's mine, my vision."

Back to the laundromat

It's almost dark outside. Inside, it smells of heat and dryer sheets and in some unfortunate corners, cigarette butts.

McFadden watches as Big Daddy pans the scene on a mechanized pivot, measuring the light in the room as it moves along. When the shutter opens, light exposes the color film through an unusually small slit - just a bit wider than a bobby pin. It hums as it slowly takes in the Oldsmobile in the parking lot, the gauntlet of Speed Queens, the lime green folding tables and the sign on the west wall ("This is your laundry away from home").

This is her fifth and final exposure of the night. It takes four minutes and 25 seconds. Big Daddy can make you wait.

"I think this will be a good one," she says. "I really do."

She says there will be more pictures like this one, images of the mundane corners of everyday life. Maybe a bowling alley or a convenience store or a late-night diner. It's a sea change for her original, postcard-gorgeous "Third Dimension Images."

"This whole 'beautiful' thing, I don't do a lot of that," she says, frowning as if it were a bit of a cheat. "Colorado has plenty of it. This is a lot more interesting."

She pauses as she starts to pack up her lens. Ultimately, the question may be whether a collector wants to walk into spaces like that. Does the technique require beautiful?

"I don't know how saleable it is," she says of this new flavor of the $1,800 pieces. She shrugs.

That's one of the perks of having your own gallery: You can show whatever you want. Hopefully, the framing shop can pick up any shortfall.

"It's tough," she says. "Art is tough. Being in a tourist town and not having any Colorado images is tough. And photography is tough. There's still a lot of people out there who don't acknowledge that it's a real art."

Then, McFadden picks up Big Daddy and, cradling it like a baby in the crook of her arm, she walks to the big white car in the parking lot.

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THIRD DIMENSION IMAGES

What: Panoramic photographs by Kathleen McFadden

Where: Range Gallery, 725 Manitou Ave. No 3

Contact: 685-1201, rangegallery.com

Contact the writer at 476-1602