My new series Everyday Beauty combines the best aspects of old and new photographic technology to create a unique vision sharing both photographic and painterly qualities, marrying the objective with the subjective and the image with the process. The idea comes from the concept of taking everyday objects and beautifying them into something perhaps best described as hyper-real. At the heart of this work is a 90 year-old brass photographic portrait lens that has unique and distinctive visual qualities designed to beautify or glamorize the likes of silent movie stars. This 1920’s lens was designed for studio usage and long exposures and did not originally include even a timed shutter nor post WWII anti-reflective, color corrective lens coatings. It has been married to a 1950’s large format shutter, mounted onto a modern (1990) era Linhof view camera and equipped to shoot modern medium and large format color negative film. This film is scanned at high resolution, processed through Photoshop as digital darkroom and output into archival pigment prints on fine-art textured paperThis process creates a unique rubric for the photographic process: generally bright lightening situations including reflective surfaces or neon lights, the choice of scenes with a clear central focus and situations calling for shallow depth of field. The result has been to create images in which everyday objects are highlighted, glamorized, idealized; perhaps somewhat akin to how media has always treated and built up celebrities. American objects – a tire swing, hotel signs, amusement rides, farm equipment, factory buildings, streets, old planes, trains and trucks, etc., become beautiful in a in a hyper-realistic way that is lifted and separated from the surrounding world. The resulting images are both thought provocative to the photographer/photographic collector and highly accessible to the painting/print collectors.This series is printed on 17” X 22” paper in a limited edition of 25 per image. A very small edition of 6 will be printed at 36” X 44”.
