Event Horizon

I have wrestled with “subject” for years and have experimented with where the locust of “significance” lies in a work. At one extreme, the subject is a building I’m photographing for a client - the image is all about capturing and representing the best qualities of the building and has nothing to do with any message the photographer needs to address. Somewhere in the middle on the subject spectrum, the print itself becomes the significant product of the photograph, not the object or scene portrayed in it - as in my Centering or Painted series photos. At the opposite extreme of the spectrum, the photograph is all about the act of visiting a location and taking photos. The images are the product of an unwitnessed performance art event. I arrive here with this series of photos as a recognition and admission that I like cameras and like taking pictures. My Grandfather, while he was alive, loved cameras and owned (at least for a little while) most all the finest cameras available in his day - Exactas, Canons, Leicas, Alpas, etc. ad nauseum - and he took photos mostly of family in stiff poses and endless repetitive snapshots of flowers in the yard. When he died, my grandmother offered me grocery sacks full of his slides. She was throwing them out because someone wanted his empty slide trays.

My Event Horizon photos are an homage to the joy of taking pictures and to all the photographers whose life’s work will eventually spiral into the grocery sack of oblivion. The title Event Horizon is a reference to the frontier around a black hole within which nothing can escape. Light that passes too close is sucked in; light skating just outside the black hole’s reach will be bent off course, but whizzes on by.

 

All photos are inkjet prints on cotton rag paper in editions of four. Redbud photos are 12"hx18"w, Apple and EyeFull are 16"hx20"w

Only a few individual images in the "composits" are posted here, though all are available.