Medium Specificity - Vivid Light

Artist's Statement

I enjoy photography as an artistic medium for its ability to capture an instant of time and present it trans-spatially and trans-temporally. A photograph is literally a window through time and space. This trait is not specific to photography – it is shared by all representational visual art. However, photography provides a level of realism that is uniquely characteristic of the medium because it mimics the human eye: light enters the body by way of a reflexive lens and exposes light-sensitive material. This piece explores this structure and function. A backlight shines through a semi-translucent colored sheet of paper, through the view finder and lens of a single-lens reflexive camera (SLR), and into the body of another SLR capturing the photo. The composition of the photographs is designed to simulate a mirror image of the camera itself, celebrating the idea of photography as a mirror of reality and a window in time and space. The image is repeated nine times with variation of color to illustrate and comment upon photography’s ability to depict a multiplicity of subjects and its capacity to capsulate light and color with vividness.

To the layman viewer, this commentary may not be obvious. However, this artist’s statement gave me the opportunity to explain this relationship with words. This multi-media clarification is the premise of the comic book style Show and Tell by Scott McCloud and, furthermore, the entire compilation book Seeing and Writing by Donald and Christine McQuade as indicated by their titles. In Show and Tell, McCloud explores the possibilities of creating meaning through the combination of words and pictures. While my piece might be considered visually appealing and emotionally provoking, the viewer might not have gleaned the celebration of photography as a window through time and space and a medium of vivid light by presentation of the image alone. This critique of the medium is clarified through the conjunctive verbiage.

Another example of this phenomenon is René Magritte’s oil painting “The Treachery of Images” (1929). The painting depicts a calabash tobacco pipe, under which lies the inscription “Ceci n'est pas une pipe” (French for “This is not a pipe”). Without the caption, the painting is nothing more than a poorly-rendered picture of a pipe. However, the conjunction of image and words creates self-reflexive commentary on the medium itself. At face value, the subtitle seems like nonsense – the painting certainly depicts a pipe – but the key word in that statement is ‘depicts’; the picture consists of strokes of pigment on a canvas that are assembled to resemble a pipe, but it is not a pipe itself. Similarly, every ‘realistic’ painting is simply a representation of its subject, and it is not the subject itself. This concept extends to photography as well. The photographs in my piece are not cameras, but are exposures on celluloid film of light reflecting from the surfaces of a camera. This is why the piece is entitled “Vivid Light.” However, there is no doubt to the viewer what the photograph depicts due to the power of visual suggestion and preconceived association of image with idea.

René Magritte, “The Treachery of Images” (1929)