What Lies Between 

A photograph is a frozen moment in time that will tell you a story if you engage with it. This story is not entirely shaped by the photographer who took the picture, but also by you, the viewer whose unique life experiences fill in the myriad of details and complexities that help to create an emotional connection to the image. I have always been interested in understanding what it is in a photograph that shapes that unique story for each of us.  Minor White was a mid nineteenth-century photographer known for his ability to sequence a group of photographs because “each gap between the pictures lets the individuality of the viewer through”. In a similar way the early 20th century Russian filmmaker Sergei Einstein talked about the “persistence of vision” to fill in the gaps between frames of a film and that this part of the story is supplied by each individual viewer.

 In this sequence of photographs, I explore these themes by making multiple images of a subject using multiple different lighting and exposure techniques that are combined to explore new stories that emerge. When looking at a flower you judge to be beautiful; what is it that forms your judgement? Is it the form, the light source, or the texture and color, or some combination of these things? What happens when one or more of these elements are changed? Each image in this series is created from a series of photographs of the same flower, each made under different lighting and camera conditions and the images are then layered into a sequence of photographs in Photoshop with selective filters applied to create a new story for that image that resonated with me. My discovery in completing this body of work was how manipulation of one or more of the basic elements of the flower (form, texture, color) can completely change the story that photograph is trying to tell you. Using these techniques each image has a unique rhythm that is almost musical in how it emerges from the photograph.