About Photography

 It was late morning when we left the Van Gogh exhibit in Miami. The sun was straight overhead and pouring through some tall palm trees that were in front of the exhibit building. Inspired by Van Gogh's love and use of bright sunlight in his paintings, I tried to capture some of his “yellow sunlight” to recreate my experience in the exhibit.

I slowed the shutter speed down to 1/40 second and moved the camera back and forth to create some blurred lines with the palm fronds all the while allowing the blazing sun to wash out the central part of my frame. At this moment, it is hard for me to totally visualize what I expect to accomplish with my final image construction. So, I gather as many diverse variations of the scene as I can to provide me with the material I will need later to rearrange into an image that reflects what I was feeling at the moment.

The final image is below. I wanted it to reflect Van Gogh’s love of bright light and color from the south of France, while at the same time show how here in Florida, we are often faced with the same creative ingredients of nature.

The technique I invented to create these images is what I've been calling "photo-cubism". It is a method of first exploring the subject with a camera. It involves moving around and through a subject, capturing it from different perspectives, a way that is natural to many photographs exploring a subject. Later, I dissect the results and re-assemble the parts into a new whole that provides a more comprehensive interpretation of the subject over time. This is related to what the Cubist painters, Picasso, Braque, Cézanne, and others set out to do in the early 20^th-century.

The image above is an assembly of parts from three separate photos of the same scene. The right and left sides are each a separate photo juxtaposed. Next, through a creative process, I call "cross-pollination", I take parts from one scene and incorporate them in various shapes on the other side of the composition in an effort to unite the colors and tie the whole piece together. This is the method I have used for most of what I have been doing in my "Odyssey" series for the past two years.

The camera used for this image was the Fuji X-Pro3 with the 18-55mm Fuji zoom lens, a combination I usually carry with me whenever I go out. The final image is 64" x 32" presented as a mounted aluminum dye-sublimation print. Combining several images side-by-side like this, I can achieve large prints without loss of image quality.