Soon after my first photography classes at the Art Institute of
Chicago in 1969, I began to carry a camera around with me as I wandered
through the nights and early mornings, on my way home from nightshift
jobs and night classes at the University of Chicago.
I had been drawn to the magical qualities of night environments long
before I learned photography, but with the photographic process, it
seemed I was able to study the visual effects more extensively, and
later, more meditatively as I would stand in the darkrooms of the school
printing the negatives that I had made of those scenes to which I was
drawn.
Some of the scenes looked like stage sets to me, waiting for the
players to arrive. Many seemed familiar, as if I had been there before.
Many were the ghosts of places that I had passed during the day, but
some seemed like visual equivalents of places in my mind that waited for
the focus of my thoughts to arrive. Some seemed like the memories of
places that I might have gone to before, in dreams that I had forgotten.
I especially liked how shadows appeared in the scenes, overlapping the
varied perspectives that the lights looked from, cubistically
constructing a composite of the scenes, observed by the light, from the
edge of the visible, along the border of darkness.
As a young kid, I was certain that light had an effect on time, and
the speed at which it passed. I didn't know the physics of it, but I
thought I could feel it, as I would watch the night snow slowly fall
before me, while an incandescent scene through a kitchen window across
the yard moved at a rate that seemed much quicker, a separate reality, a
fragment of life and light within the infinity of darkness. Light
always seemed to have a limited, time connected life, while the dark
seemed to fall through space and infinity without effort.
The photographs presented at this site are part of an ongoing series
of several hundred that I continue to work on, and occasionally add to.
The earliest work, from 1969 to 1971, came from 35mm negatives, printed
on 8"x10" Portriga Rapid paper. In 1972 I switched to 4"x5" sheet
film, and printed on 11"x 14" Portriga Rapid until 1989 when I switched
to a warmtone, Hungarian paper called Forte Elegance.
