A group show this month, Salon 2010, highlights some of Castell Photography’s best photos yet.

by Ursula Gullow . portrait by Anthony Bellemare

With its black walls, red floors, industrial fixtures and neoclassical furniture, Castell Photography Salon and Gallery is something of a metaphor for the range of photographic processes it represents. The earliest forms of photography—wet plate collodions and daguerreotypes—are shown, as are cutting edge digital photographic processes and mixed media work. “There is a major misconception about photography—that it is heavily reproducible and therefore not valuable,” says Brie Castell, the 34-year-old gallery owner. “Everything we have shown and will show is in small editions, and much of it consists of one-of-a-kind imagery”

Castell, who has an MFA in photography from East Carolina University in Greenville, opened the gallery on Wilson Alley in downtown Asheville in April 2009. She’s been showing her own work and the work of others’ from around the country. “It’s been an intense year and a half,” she says. “I’m shocked by how far we’ve come.”

So in December, she plans to celebrate. Rockers put out “best of” albums; Castell will put up a “best of” exhibit. Salon 2010 features the work of ten artists represented at Castell Photography this year. The lineup includes black-and-white photos by emerging Czech photographer Martin Stranka, stylized cyanotypes of Ben Isburg, pinhole photos by Walter Crump and the work of Yugoslavian photographer Daniel Kariko, now an assistant professor at East Carolina University.

Castell plans to exhibit her own work, culled from two solo shows she produced in 2010. Her fairytale self-portraiture series, Finding Her Place, was produced from a homemade pinhole camera that she constructed out of an old book. Sensual portraits from her Boudoir series will be displayed along with her scratched, manipulated enlarged Polaroids. The photos were featured in a spread of the Amsterdam publication Eyemazing last year.

Salon 2010 also features the mixed-media artwork of Ashevillean Bridget Conn. Conn, 32, often incorporates organic materials like rice, dirt and sugar into her artwork and installations. “I grew up in a very suburban existence,” she says. “The idea of going out to pick a berry was the most foreign thing in the world.”

She might photograph assemblages of earthy stuff—apple cores, seeds or plants—and then print them in sections onto used tea bags. Later, she reassembles all the images and glues them onto board. For Conn, the tea bags represent a ritual she has enjoyed since she was a kid. “There’s that clink of a spoon on a teacup that is so nostalgic for me,” she says. Her mixed media art reflects her desire to break out of the matted, framed format so familiar to photography. You can expect other artists in the show to be equally unconventional.

For more on Salon 2010, check out www.castellphotography.com.