Phil Drucker's MobileImaging Blog: November 2011

Thursday, November 10, 2011

In regard to the black and white images on this blog

These are Familiar Places

If in fine arts it is the hand that creates then the mind must prelude the hand as the first step in the creative process. And as a stove is neither responsible for the success or failure of a meal, neither is the camera responsible for the success or failure of a photograph. The photographer must recognize the limits and possibilities of the camera and with visual virtuosity take command of the instrument, and in turn seek his subject matter and coax the subject out of the machine.

That being said, with regard to this body of work let us not ignore the elephant in the room. The images in this group were created using a Motorola Droid mobile device and the application Retro Camera. They were captured in black and white and adjusted with minimum postproduction. The original 6x6 prints were made on Moab Lasal Paper using an Epson 3800 printer.

I have spent my career chasing technical perfection in my photographs and after thirty years have chosen to embrace technical imperfection in exchange for the clarity of gesture, form, line, and light, at the moment my eye is set upon the subject. The freedom to work unencumbered and spontaneously without the confines of the traditional camera and its practices has liberated my eyes and has left me with no other devices of concern except for the pure vision of the subject at the moment of capture.

When asked about the elements that make this a cohesive group of images my response is layered. These are magical places for me reduced to a minimum of visual components. The physical characteristics of the images are darkened corners, dark spaces, and rich silvery surfaces. Sharp rendering combined with areas of soft focus, atmospheric light, emphasize my formal considerations. Each stand in perfect balance with the melancholy emotional solitude buried within the image.

At the risk of stating the obvious we seek the subjects that we are intrinsically drawn to. This becomes our process. So at the end of the day, a group of dissimilar subjects can emerge in total harmony as a unified body of work.

These are familiar places both physically and emotionally that I have visited over the course of my life. Fragile images of a crumbling swimming pool, empty chairs at a Labor Day party, a decommissioned rusting jet plane, abstractions of open spaces and a tennis court whose net is a line of weeds stand in various stages of arthritic decay. As I walk the grounds of these familiar places their pending mortality is palpable and inevitable.

In a similar way, the lattice of intention that holds our world together is also extremely fragile, and its integrity has been tested. Economic systems, infrastructure and freedom are bound by dependency on a trust that the system will stay intact and our beliefs and values will be upheld... World events have shattered aspects of our individual ability to count on these systems. I question their reliability and ponder their mortality. Through these images my fears, hopes and memories are realized.

This body of work was reviewed at the Arts Quest Portfolio Review in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in November 2011. The review panel included accomplished men and woman from the fields of photography, Steven Perloff, Martin McNamara, Terry Bodie, Janice Lipzin, Ricardo Viera, Marc Cohen and Theo Anderson. They described the work as “an emotional homerun, a down to essentials unified body of work, whose eclectic subject selection is rendered with abstraction, precision, and as whose visual elements are as they should be and in total harmony.”