The following artist statement and photographs are from my recent photographic exhibit “Sacred Time: Journeys from Dusk to Dawn.”
The exhibit features 50 black and white photographs taken in various locations under low-light conditions.
Artist Statement
While meditating at night, I’ve heard heating ducts expand and click in the walls. I’ve heard the wind make antenna wire flap in the eaves. I’ve heard the footfalls of a cat moving across the carpet, and I’ve heard the miracle of my own breath entering and leaving my body.
While mindful of these things, the confusion and stress of the day dissolves into a mental warmth I am at a loss to explain. It becomes a sacred time where I feel connected to all that surrounds me. It’s a moment where I feel a connection to the divine.
In a similar way, photography provides me with a heightened sense of awareness and connection to my environment. In the moments leading to the capture of an image, I am aware that I am stepping out of ordinary time and into sacred time. I have no sense of audience, but an overwhelming gratefulness for the scene that has presented itself. Technical abilities I may have acquired over the years have helped me to eliminate distractions and allow me to enjoy the moment of exposure.
My interest in low-light photography lies with my personal fascination with night, both in real and metaphorical terms. We normally reserve night for sleeping, and as a result, miss its visual wisdom and beauty. On a deeper level, the Christian mystic John-of-the-Cross talks about a “dark night of the soul,” where one must experience darkness in a spiritual sense before finding the “light.” He labels this as a phase in one’s spiritual life where loneliness and desolation prevail, but is nonetheless necessary to obtain spiritual maturity and union with God.
In a technical sense, I value the meticulous craftsmanship taught to me by my father, as well as his belief that intuition is everything in art. Through him, I’ve come to understand that photography is indeed, painting with light.
Night photography presents its own set of challenges. Depending on how much light is available, I may choose to use a time exposure to gather whatever is needed to capture a scene. With a time exposure, I possess the eyes of a cat or an owl. I extend the limits of my visual range and collect subtle traces of light as they linger asleep on a landscape or texture of a leaf. This requires that I study a scene very carefully and use my imagination as to how the available light will paint the subject. I minimize the difficulty of photographing a night scene by “bracketing.” This involves shooting a scene in multiple exposure modes and evaluating at a later time which image works best.
I have also learned that light from distant flashes of lightning can awaken a night landscape, creating areas of dramatic intensity and harsh shadows. The result is an ethereal quality and otherworldly beauty. With lightning, no two performances are alike and each exposure is unique.
These photographs attempt to chronicle the visual wisdom that dusk, night, and morning present. Darkness makes us withdraw into ourselves. Our senses gradually adapt to the absence of light, and thus begins our journey to dawn. I have discovered that light lives in the most unlikely of places. It meanders quietly in darkness and makes itself known to the mindful photographic eye.
The “infinite expectation of the dawn,” as Thoreau once told us, “does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep.”
