There is little light at night and as a result camera exposures are long; 1,2 10,20, or 30 seconds. I’ve photographed with the camera on a tripod, a monopod and handholding. I think the most successful photographs are the handheld ones. If you look closely enough at these, sometimes you can see my respirations and feel my pulse.
As dusk turns to night color fades from our vision. Our retina contains rods and cones. Cones are responsible for color vision. They must collect a lot of light for our perception to be in color. Rods are much more sensitive. They function under very low light levels, and they present a monochromatic image. As a result we loose the awareness of color at night. The camera, at night, does not suffer from this limitation.
Surface reflectance and the color composition of light determine our perception of color. During the day the quality of light has a fairly even mix of all of the colors of the spectrum (roy-g-bv) (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet). Only when objects are illuminated with light of this composition will our perceptions of color be normal. Cameras are designed to see color like our eyes, presented with a full color spectrum, color is recorded as expected.
Light at night tends to have limited color composition and the camera’s recording necessarily appears otherworldly. If we could perceive color at night, likely it would appear like this.
fast food and pink meat
we are what we eat
foods of convenience and necessity
Food is more than just what we eat; it is life itself, family, tradition, birth, marriage, sickness, and death. I have been looking a lot at food lately and much of it looks like this
In science, truth and beauty are often equated. Although beauty is always in the eye of the beholder, clearly much of what we eat is not food.
A well-honed portrait could be viewed as evidence.
Images from this series are of SX70 polaroid portraits. They are autobiographical and forensic in nature. Identity is elusive.
evidence of life allowed
evidence of life lived
evidence of life
In striving to make meaningful images often times we lose sight of the fact that at its most fundamental, photography is a visual means of expression. These are just pictures of fowl. Pretty ones indeed. Visual confection, satiating but not symbolic....Some times this is enough.
We used to have Lobster races the evening before Thanksgiving. The loser would go into the pot first. Our friend Jane insisted that Lobsters and Roaches were related. She never participated
After 9/11 almost everyone I know who makes art, made art. My son Talor and I made the images of police and firemen at that time. I’ve continued through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with images of solders.
I had been working of series on images, which are explorations of photographic representation, and had been wondering about the minimum amount of information necessary for a readable image when I became acquainted with the paintings of Giorgio Morandi.
About Morandi: from "Giorgio Morandi" by Karen Wilkin
...a tug of war - between the specific and the elemental lies at the heart of Morandi's work. He seems to explore how much he can simplify before the objects … become unrecognizable.
…It often seems as though he were testing the limits of representation…
…objects seem to be on the brink of dissolving without ever quite relinquishing their recognizably solid origins.
…apparently identical groupings of objects, altered by the addition or subtraction of a single element,..., can serve to completely shift the dynamic weight and the spatial logic of a given composition…
…Taken one by one, the paintings are close studies in rhythm and balance…seen in series, intricate rhyme schemes surface as objects change shape, placement and chromatic tone…
Morandi’s paintings seem a perfect point of departure for this body of work. I have photographing still life’s in homage to Morandi. Although I am quite comfortable esthetically with digital image manipulation, these images are not of that ilk. Full resolution photographs are re-sized to 36 pixels wide and printed with an inkjet on transparency material. These small (3.6mm wide) prints are re-photographed microscopically and re-printed to 24 in x15 in. The dots on the enlarged photographs are actually drops of ink. I am beginning to understand the translation from large to small and back again to large and its affect on the limits of representation. I still have much to learn about Morandi’s approach to spatial logic.