Magic or Science or both?

Photography is a medium that is made of light and time. That is so odd and unique in my opinion. Other mediums are made of pigment, wood, canvas… but photography has an element of intangibility built into it. That makes it magical for me.

I have always been a little bit of a nerd. I can easily go on deep dives into subjects… I love research. Photography provides me with a way to play with lots of different ideas I find interesting, and not just an image making capacity. I enjoy the alchemy, the science the magic of it all. If you have never made a print in the darkroom you might not know what I’m talking about, but believe me its nothing short of magic.

When science meets mystery, it produces an entire new level of fascination for me and the fact that photography is made up of light and time makes for a pretty good subject for me to daydream about. One fact that keeps me up at night is photons, the particles making up light, don’t experience time. They have no mass and don’t experience the universe the way we do. A photon perceives, if it could, the moment it is absorbed by your eye and the moment it was created in the big bang as the same thing. There is no space or time it traversed to get to you according to it.

I find it completely mind blowing that the very thing I use to create images, that stops time, doesn’t experience time at all. Photons are in large part what creates time-based media, or is it? Perhaps our perception, our scaling down of the universe is really the only thing creating it. Our limitations are part of what makes the world look and feel the way it is. Imagine a flip book. It is just a book from the outside perspective. It’s just an object, but once you move from one segment to the next a moving reality appears in the pages.

I enjoy, and am mystified by the idea’s photography brings to the table. Not just in its ability to create an image, but how it does so. Scientifically, spiritually, chemically etc…  In that way I feel it is so different than other mediums and is one of the main reasons I choose to use it to create art. Thinking about crazy things like this is half the fun for me. Playing with reality and how it works is something I will always enjoy about the photographic process.