Flower still life in sun

still life photography
printed in color, minimum order size 60×40 cm
click for purchase / more info

Flower still life in shadow

still life photography
printed in color, minimum order size 60×40 cm
click for purchase / more info

The most interesting comment I received for this still life, which resulted from hundreds of exposures, was from a French painter who exhibited several niches away from my collection of multi-exposure photographic prints at a collective exhibition in Tokyo. His painted houses and streets were reduced to the ultimately bare essentials, which I thought was very effective. I explained to him that I tried to overcome the well-known restraints of photographers who could, unlike painters, not capture the hardly perceivable details in the shadow and at the same time the brightest parts of your image. Painters can render objects a few centimeters away and scenes at infinity equally sharp, and can make their canvases as broad as they want, while photographers have the choose whether to focus on foreground or background, and are saddled with the perspective and corner distortions of wide-angle lenses.

By combining the various multi-exposure techniques to overcome these limitations you achieve an effect that many exhibition goers prompted to remark: that’s a painting! My colleague exhibitor, who had never seen this before, remarked that contemporary figurative painters who were, with their attention to details doing the exact opposite to what he was striving for, could not hope to produce anything approaching what my technique had achieved.
When I was in my teens a vehement discussion raged around us photography adepts as to whether or not what we were doing could be classified as an art. I had concluded that most of the time it isn’t. This conclusion is fortified when I see the hordes of spectators digging their telephones out of their pockets for snapping with machine-gun speed whatever is in their line of vision.
But the question of how what we do is different from what figurative painters have always done has been with me from those early days.