- Novalis (1772 - 1801)
Hymns to the Night
Postscript. Clicking on the image at the top will take you to a new Plato's Cave portfolio in my web gallery. For those of you who have not already guessed at how these images have been created (I posted the first in the series a few weeks ago with the heading, Platonic Forms), the title (and reference) will be obvious from the process: I shine thin beams of light (using one, two, or three flexible gooseneck LEDs with magnetic bases secured to a metal plate for stability) through a wide assortment of acrylic geometric forms (squares, prisms, pyramids, circles, spheres, etc.) ranging in size from a quarter of inch to about three or four inches and of varying translucency and color (many of the forms are infused with multiple colors that depend on the direction of light that hits their surface), and photograph the most "pleasing combinations" of the resulting clusters of lights and shadows that appear on a black matte board pitched vertically some distance beyond where the LEDs are stationed. Note that while the images look noisy, it is not actual "noise" you are seeing, but rather the impression of noise due to the collective specular reflections of light off the matte board's imperfectly speckled surface.
Apart from my delight in being able to use this technique to explore a part of the abstract aesthetic latent space pioneered by László Moholy-Nagy, Itten, Kandinsky, Klee, Robert & Sonia Delaunay, and explored by my dad in his later years (albeit, in my case, on a woefully amateurish level compared to these extraordinary artists), I am intrigued conceptually, philosophically even, by how blatantly it blurs the distinction between traditional art and photography. I say this because for this series photography plays only a minor (and least important) role! Arranging and discovering a "pleasing configuration" of lights and forms requires a lot of time and patience. It typically takes me about 20-30 min to find a single geometry worth taking an image of. Indeed, the process of choosing the type and number of shapes, adjusting the light's intensity, direction, and the beam size, and making the myriad small changes (during which I often have to start from scratch because it is simply "not working") needed to gradually sculpt (reveal?) a "pleasing geometry" - for which the final "shot" is almost an afterthought - is arguably more akin to making art than doing photography!
My lifelong fascination with the blurred distinction between art and photography has directly fueled my experiments in abstraction, wherein I deliberately try to tease apart (disentangle?) the creative tension between finding abstract patterns vs. creating them. Individual projects all follow their own style and rhythm. For example, for my Synesthscapes series, I search for patterns in what are essentially "fixed" environments (e.g., natural light refracting/reflecting through a rum bottle); for my Swirls, Whorls, and Tendrils series, I create singular "worlds" made up of ink and water, which I then photograph whatever time-slice of if it proves to be sufficiently interesting; my perpetual winter passion to find ice abstracts consists of exactly that, finding patterns that nature herself has already produced; my light abstracts emerge from fixed geometries of light filaments and intentional random camera movements, wherein I decide whether an image is "good enough" to keep only after taking the photograph; and Cymatiscapes require little more of me than to choose a vessel type and size (e.g., a small soy sauce dish) and a vibration frequency before clicking the shutter in my camera's burst mode. Compared to these earlier experiments, the process of creating - literally, creating - images for Plato's Cave is obviously on an entirely different level! Of course, in the most fundamental sense, distinctions between art and photography (and, as someone has commented below) between art and life, are not blurred, they are illusory.
