Photographs make up first single-student exhibit at community college

It's the texture of a stone, the detailed carvings etched on a black Victorian lamp that fascinate Olivia Morris. So much so, that she whips out her iPhone 4 and snaps a photo, permanently storing the tiny design her eye found.

"The smallness of certain objects and the detail," she said, standing in Carroll Community College's Babylon Great Hall, her photos plastered on the room's walls. "How you can zoom in a little bit, and you get all these things that somebody had to etch at some point, that somebody had to sculpt, that somebody had to manufacture, measure, send back because the blueprints were wrong or had to care about for at least five seconds and then package and sell."

The New Windsor resident and sophomore French major is the first student to have her own exhibit at Carroll Community College, according Maggie Ball, the college's art department director. The exhibit, "A Closer Look: Photographs by Olivia Morris," opened in early February and will be up until March 15.

The offer to hang about 25 to 30 of her photos up in the Babylon Great Hall was one that caught Morris, a self-taught photography lover, off guard.

Last spring, Morris took Ball's two-dimensional design course. After the first class, Morris went up to Ball and showed her teacher several of her photos - a detailed shot of plate after plate of sushi and one of her cat Alice's face, green eyes piercing, a shadow darkening half of the feline's face.

Ball saw something to Morris' approach to the lens. It was precise and concise, dynamic and interesting, Ball said.

So in October, Ball approached Morris with a question: "Do you want to do an art show in February?" Morris recalled her asking.

Morris remembered feeling surprised. She remembered wondering if she was good enough. But she was resolved to give it a whirl.

She had about five or six photos she was satisfied with - not nearly the 25 to 30 required of an exhibit in the college's big room. It was time to take more photos with her iPhone and the occasional shot with her digital camera.

"I tried, and I tried, and nothing worked because I was trying," Morris said. "So I decided to let it come to me."

It did when she saw a preying mantis scaling the college's red-bricked wall. And when a grasshopper was sitting near a glass wall. And when her grandmother accidentally washed some dollar bills and laid them out to dry.

On Wednesday morning at the college, Ball turned to Morris to lay out a detailed explanation of her favorite photo of the exhibit. It's from inside Morris' grandparents' New Windsor home. It's a tan plug, with a string of tiny metal balls lying on top and next to it, near the drain of a shower - the tub's floor white and blue with age.

"It's such an ordinary object - something we entirely take for granted," Ball said.

But it's being able to look at the object with a different eye and see the art in those details that Ball said she likes about Morris' work.

While Morris plans to continue her photography - but as a hobby, she said, unless she is lucky enough to have it support her financially - Ball said she has a wish for her former student.

"My hope," Ball said, "is she will always have a camera in her back pocket somewhere."