A Sense of Light
Photographs | Film
One-Man exhibit, Five Points Gallery Annex, Torrington, CT 2023
As several essays about photography have noted, one of the ways in which photography differs from other art forms is in the “all-at-once-ness” of the photographic process. While the contemporary photographer is free to create layer upon layer of images to build up a visual statement, my photographs in A Sense of Light work are an all-at-once documentation of that moment when my eye-brain comes face-to-face with fleeting patterns of light and shadow.
The words of artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy describe this kind of interaction with light. He writes, “The magic possibility of framing a certain space and time is what brought me to photography. This process of recording elements of three dimensions in the flow of time, and fixing them in a two-dimensional image, creates a new context for the elements of the phAaaotograph…”
In A Sense of Light, I work within the etymology of the word “photography,” meaning “drawing with light.” For the viewer of my photographs, there is on-going interaction with light/space/time in the way I experience it when making the image—only a drawing with light that is frozen in time and space.
In these photographs, light does not illuminate an object; light is, itself, the object.The photograph is a two-dimensional record of light, color and abstract shape which functions not as a mirror of the world I see, but as a passport to experience. Each photograph becomes a place where viewers are free to draw from their experiences to create their own world of beauty, fiction or truth when connected to the physical quality of light I’ve shared.
