Painting with Light

The original meaning of the word “photography” is “writing with light”, yet modern instantaneous photography usually lacks the quality of manual gesture the phrase suggests. But a long exposure photograph, like a canvas or a sheet of paper, can receive the movements of the artist’s hands and eyes like any other form of painting.

In these images the subject is photographed in a dark environment with the camera’s shutter locked open. The lightpainter moves around the subject, applying strokes with hand-held lights as a painter would wield a brush. The results cannot be controlled with any precision, so chance introduces its own magic to the process. Several lighting variations on the same pose may later be digitally layered in these luminous meditations on the life force as manifested in the human body.  Colors may be digitally altered, but there is absolutely no digital painting or digitally generated imagery here.