Selected Photography - Index
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Illinois Landscapes
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Not since the early 1990s have I shown photographs in a gallery as a primary medium. This is not to say taking photos ever stopped for me. In my statement I mention various ways of engaging the environment – through collecting, sorting, identifying, and drawing – and I very well may have added photographing. To my friends and family, I am the documentarian of the group and, frankly, I feel it celebrates any event in the short term and reinforces memory down the road. Some say that a camera is a filter or barrier to a subject, but I find my experiences enriched by slowing everything down and studying for the right shot. Vintage portraits and landscapes have sneaked into my mixed media work as a kind of time-travel puncture in the composition, and every image I snap from nature informs the painting process when in the studio. (Think Hudson River School and the large-scale canvases they made from field sketches and notations.) Above are several collections of photos taken over the years and arranged into loose categories. Most of the pictures were not intended as singular or final, or even public, but as a pause in the stream of a larger visual narrative. Two details of nature that appear identical might contain the subtle and elusive shift I’m looking for in my artwork. People shots invariably have the challenge of capturing a moment of peak emotion, just as the right landscape depiction can reveal something beneath a scene we take for granted. Something beautiful is often that which more perfectly conforms to our expectations and, for this - like the conundrum of the resonant found object resisting any further artistic action or expression - I am aware that the subject of a photograph can also be so compelling that it remains away from art and a document only. By choosing the mundane, or the indescribable, I'm hoping that a picture may get me one inch closer to inside or elsewhere.
Note: These images are Copyright © 2020 Andrew Young. All rights reserved.