Shoe boxes? As art? Photographer showcases beauty of the container

[...] “Le Scarpe,” featuring the 12 most photogenic shoe-box interiors culled from a houseful of shoe boxes, makes its premiere at Corden/Potts Gallery. “These empty boxes really captivated my emotions,” says Kellenberger, 59, a Swiss immigrant and self-taught fine artist with a remarkably long attention span and Zen-like patience. Kellenberger works on the ground floor and garage of his two-story home in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond, which has been converted to a photography lab and darkroom. Here he has made studies of things that come out of packages — spaghetti, rice, aspirin — but never before the packages themselves. From the start, he wanted the boxes of name designers of women’s shoes. Coming to the rescue was his sister-in-law, a costume designer in Hollywood. “It never really worked the way that I wanted, but I was just so fascinated by it I had to keep trying,” he says. When it worked, he commandeered the dining room and turned it into a studio, hanging a backdrop from the ceiling and putting the copper sheet on the dining room table. Twenty years brought him to this moment; then it took him only half a day to shoot his pictures, with the help of fellow photographer Hendrik Paul. The living room and dining room were covered in boxes awaiting their turn, and he moved them through like kids posing for their class picture. “I realized there are some boxes that have a texture inside or have a designer logo that is beautiful,” he says. By now, his wife has given up on the idea of the recycle bin as the ultimate destination for the boxes. A pure Cyanotype is blue, so he added wine tannin to create tones of brown, yellow and green. “I’m prepared for people to come up and say, ‘This is just an empty box,’” he says.