Florida photographer Karen Glaser also focuses on North Florida springs

The 8^th Annual Fort Myers Film Festival takes place March 21-25, 2018. Among the more than 90 films that will be screened during the festival’s five-day run is Lost Springs, a 40-minute Matt Keene documentary that follows artist Margaret Ross Tolbert as she experiences a collection of freshwater Florida springs normally inaccessible due to a dam.

The viability and conservation of North Florida’s aquifer and freshwater springs is a topic of enduring interest to Southwest Florida art lovers. One of the more popular exhibitions to grace the walls of the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery on the Lee campus of Florida SouthWestern State College (FSW) was The Mark of Water: Florida’s Springs and Swamps, a touring exhibition of the underwater photography of Karen Glaser organized and circulated by the Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona State College, Daytona Beach, Florida. The Mark of Water exhibited locally from October 7 through December 3, 2011 and resulted in the highest attendance recorded by the gallery in two years.

Four of Glaser’s images from that exhibition are now part of Florida Gulf Coast University’s portable works collection, vis:

• Dust Storm, a 2006 pigment print photo hanging in the 2nd floor corridor of Academic Building 5 (above right);
• Fire in the Pines #1, a 2010 pigment print photo hanging in Conference Room 210 in Academic Building 5;
• Ichetucknee Fog, a 2010 pigment print photo hanging in the 3rd floor corridor of Academic Building 5; and
• Ichetucknee Cypress, a 2010 pigment print photo hanging in Conference Room 309 of Academic Building 5.

Dust Storm, Ichetucknee Fog and Ichetucknee Cypress come form a series of pictures that Glaser shot predominantly in the pristine freshwater rivers and springs of north and central Florida, places like the Orange Grove Sink in the Peacock Springs Cave System in Suwannee County, Silver Glen in the Ocala National Forest in Marion County, Manatee Springs State Park and the crystalline Ichetucknee River.

Isolated, crystal clear and chilly, the Ichetucknee flows for six glorious miles through shaded hammocks and wetlands before it joins with the Sante Fe River. It’s popular with University of Florida students, who flock to the spring during the summer to tube the slow-flowing spring. But Glaser didn’t trek to the Ichetucknee to tube the river. “My husband and I snorkled the Ichetucknee in winter, when the air was 40 degrees and the water 68,” Glaser recalls. “But we didn’t go then merely to avoid the tubers. That’s when the garfish spawn.”

Since her Mark of Water exhibition, Glaser has exhibited her photographic images at Watson MacRae Gallery on Sanibel Island.

For more on Glaser and her process, read here.

You will have two chances to view the Lost Springs during the Fort Myers Film Festival. The first is at the Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center at 1:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 24. The second is at the IMAG History & Science Center at 2000 Cranford Ave. during the 5:30 p.m. block on Saturday, March 24.

March 7, 2018.

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