Magical
Emanations
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| Afternoon Landscape (04.27.20) Akron, Ohio |
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| Afternoon Landscape, Long Lake Channel (05.20.19), Portage Lakes, Ohio |
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| Afternoon Landscape, White Pond Crossing (05.03.20), Akron, Ohio |
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| Afternoon Auto-Landscape, Club 611 (04.27.20), Akron |
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| Afternoon Clouds over Club 611 (07.23.12), Akron |
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| Afternoon Landscape, Copley Community Park (07.27.19), Copley, Ohio |
By
Tom Wachunas
“All photographs are memento mori. To take a
photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality,
vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing
it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” ―
Susan Sontag
“It is an illusion that photos are made with
the camera… they are made with the eye, heart and head.” —
Henri Cartier-Bresson
“I can look at a fine art photograph and
sometimes I can hear music.” – Ansel Adams
- all the images here are digital infrared photographs
- © Stephen
Paternite
More Spring
gleaning, more virtual curating, in the spirit of my post here from May 7.
During my Facebook browsing excursions of late, I’ve been admiring a
significant number of black-and-white digital photographs by Stephen Paternite.
He’s a prolific Akron artist who has been working in infrared photography since
1978. As an evolved photography technique, digital infrared is empowered with a
particular sensitivity to light radiations beyond the visible color spectrum. A
marvelous tool for seeing the otherwise unseeable.
Amid the
incessant showers of photographs saturating social media, the ubiquity of
bright, clamorous color can sometimes feel numbing. In that context, it’s only
at first glance that Paternites’s digital infrared black-and-white images might
seem like curious incongruities – throwbacks to another era. Yet they’re
actually a calming respite from the deafening polychromatic noise of the
Internet.
Look closely. Not at them so much as inside them.
You might even hear them - veritable
symphonies of dramatic tonal contrasts and exquisite textures. These impeccably
composed pictures are spectral landscapes, or dreamscapes, if you will,
emanating an immersive, crystalline light that transforms the familiar into
something wholly enchanting and otherworldly.
And it seems
to me that beyond being a maker of beautiful photographs, Stephen Paternite is
also a poet. Think of his work as optical writing - a wordless, arresting
poetry - articulating the luminous persistence of nature’s quiet magic.
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