Playing with light

Once color became an important issue to me I started to deal with how color can transform light and vice versa. Natural sunlight, candle light, and electricity all have their own quality that I wanted to play with a bit. In theater design, I have learned that light is a very important instrument for evoking feeling from an audience. A combination of lights can provide visual stimulation that enhances the performance itself. So I had a feeling this might also be true for an image I would photograph.

But that makes me think, is my purpose to evoke feelings or thoughts from people with my pictures? We often discuss what art is and the discussion of making people think or feel is often associated with good art. I have always believed that if a piece becomes meaningful to someone by evoking feelings or thoughts than it is art.

But if I chose to distort reality by playing with light through my camera lens what does that mean about me socially or culturally? As I began to take pictures with light in mind I noticed that instead moved towards taking pictures that involved light but that seemed to be more about a scene I liked. Susan Sontag tells us that this might occur when she writes, "To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged...to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing..." (12). Perhaps my reverting to scenes that I like is an indicator that I am indeed affected by all the imagery that has come before me and that subconsciously I want my images to be like them too. Maybe I secretly desire things staying the same, which would be another reason why I might have reinforced the nostalgia I've been feeling with my sepia toned pictures. I don't know why I felt that trees and clouds were worth photographing but in the moment I felt a calmness and a will to take that picture. Perhaps it is me being influenced by the collection of images in our culture or maybe I just wanted to show something that was interesting to me. Either way I ended up liking a lot of the shots that were supposed to be about light and ended up being about my perception of things.