ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Now On View: September 8th-30th, 2007

The effort to communicate the exhilaration felt in that instant of seeing is, in my opinion, the most compelling reason to make photographs.

However, as time flows ever forward, the distance between that instant and its image becomes wider. The gulf deepens when we hang that image in a gallery space, a location often physically far from the scene photographed.

This installation is an attempt to reduce those distances. By using the projected, living image of the lens-aided camera obscura, I seek to eliminate the distance between the photographic moment and its witness - they are now simultaneous. Also done away with is the photographic object itself (the print); by only projecting and not capturing any of these images, one concentrates on the experience of seeing and the presence of being. Lastly, by bringing the world just beyond the gallery walls into the gallery, I hope to inspire thought about presence, being, and the gallery space as a place where we experience communication through images.

This work encourages the act of seeing without recording, a reconsideration of photography’s preoccupation with “the decisive moment”, and an images removal from the world and placement in a gallery. Your experience of these images will only occur in this moment; this is a commemoration of now.

Luke Strosnider
Rochester, New York
September 2007