My Dyslexia’s ‘ability’ has gifted me the opportunity to communicate with my subject differently to most fine art photographers.
Through my collective unconscious, temporal intuitiveness, and the cumulation of psychological time, I can visualise the rhythms and rhymes of light that radiate from the subject’s soul. I give them ‘shape’ and ‘form,’ the precise moment I make the choice to depress the shutter, whether or not it is in a fraction of a second or the start of a longer exposure. This moment I define as ‘The Poetry of Light.’ I am a ‘lightsmith:’ the art and craft is in both the image capture and the process of completion, ready for final output in whatever medium the art requires.
Having started photography with a 35mm film camera, processing and printing my own images gave me a clearer understanding of how the process of fine art making is always in state of flux and fluidity.
During the investigative process of converting film to digital or RAW images to a useable format, my ‘communication’ with the subject continues. Pixilated light fragments of the subject’s soul reveal unforeseen and undiscovered nuances and narratives. ‘Old-school’ darkroom techniques create further opportunities to extract the final art form from any remaining dross, that can be digitally skimmed from the two-dimensional surface.
Because the fine art I produce lives outside of its digital construction and luminance displayed by my computer screen, many prints are made. They are hung conventionally as they would have been in the dark room for drying, then examined under different lighting scenarios to view the image’s luminosity.
Cropping and framing decisions are crucial to the subject’s final composition and the viewer’s experience. Whether or not the subject has been consciously or unconsciously positioned in-camera to comply with the mathematical calculations governing the Golden Rule of composition, I can manipulate the viewers’ visual scanning and interpretation so that it can be creatively challenged, depending on my intention of the art I want to create. For this reason I make these decisions physically by using the prints, and two plastic ‘L’ shapes, which have both white or black faces to suit the subject’s ‘high’ or ‘low key/night’ lighting.
‘The Poetry of Light’ fine art photography I produce is a ‘love-affair’ that has never lost its attraction: it is the only way I can truthfully, and passionately, communicate the existential ‘realities’ of this world.