From December 7th to 16th, the Exposure Gallery in Vancouver will present its Winter Salon show. I’ll have two images on view there. Here’s the first one.
I’m not going to tell you the name or what I think it means. Why don’t you tell me?
As this weblog is very new, I don’t expect a flood of response around the posting date - but even years from now I’d appreciate your view.
Cities in ancient civilisations featured giant statues of gods and kings in their town squares. The subliminal effect was that as people led their lives at the feet of the giants they were influenced to believe that they were politically and spiritually puny.
Statues, signs and symbols around us that we don’t even consciously ponder are absorbed into our psyche. I think these influence how we see the world and ourselves, intuitively and irrationally. What they mean for us is subjective, and the subjectivity of meaning is something that interests me.
Read the rest of this entry »
Black and white photos have many shades of grey. So if my view of black and white seems black and white recall the many shades.
I started in black and white photography, in a high school darkroom. A first lesson was that a BW print is actually etched in silver. And by accepting BW I had the power to print photos. But like Jackie Paper leaving Puff, I left for colour photography and never returned to Honalee.
I’m a fan of abstraction. BW is an abstraction by extraction. By removing the colour it focuses the mind on line and tone. It creates a mood. It’s self-referential, because the lack of colour is a constant reminder that it is an artifact, not the subject but a thing in itself. For a modern device, it has a distinctly postmodern meaning. Read the rest of this entry »
Light from the sun hit a woman in the face in Greenwich this summer. Judging by her expression, it hurt. Most of the light then routinely bounced off, hitting in turn the railroad tracks, the surveillance cameras, the passengers and warning signs of a railroad station. One small rectangle of it was interrupted by my camera. An even smaller rectangle entered a new dimension.
The photons hitting my light sensor started a chain reaction of other minute particles also moving near light speed. By a juggling magic scientists must be very proud of, they set up a kind of perpetual motion. The impact of that light from the woman’s face became a series of digital symbols, which were composed of electromagnetically looping particles. Read the rest of this entry »