Exhibit offers snapshots of couple's adventures

Virginia Sanders was a painter and sketcher. But it wasn’t until she and her late husband, Dr. Jack Sanders, became a couple that she became a photographer as well.

“He showed me that you’re not just snapping a snapshot,” Sanders said. “There’s a lot you can do with photography.”

The couple’s photography will be on display from Thursday, May 14, through Thursday, June 25, in the
“Sanders Memorial Photography Show” at the Senior Friendship Center, in Sarasota. The show is co-sponsored by the Senior Friendship Center and the Suncoast Camera Club and features 72 photographs — 39 by Jack Sanders, who died last August, and 33 by Virginia Sanders.

The show includes pictures of local subjects, such as turtles, peacocks and actors in a local medieval fair.
Many were shot with the Suncoast Camera Club, which Jack Sanders founded 28 years ago.

Other photographs feature subjects from the Sanderses’ travels. In the photograph, “Leopard in the Tree Top,” Jack Sanders captured a leopard in Kenya resting on a tree branch.

Virginia Sanders, who traveled mostly in the United States before she married Jack, recently read the memoir of famed photographer Osa Johnson, entitled “I Married Adventure: The Lives of Martin and Osa Johnson.” In the book, Johnson tells how she thought she would stay put in her native Kansas, but wound up in Africa, photographing whatever adventures she and her husband encountered.

To Virginia Sanders, the story sounded familiar.

if you go:

Sanders Memorial
Photography Show
When: Opening reception is 5:30 to 7 p.m. Thursday, May 14; the exhibit continues from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays through Thursday, June 25
Where: Senior Friendship Center, 1888 Brother Geenen Way, Sarasota