Karl F. Stewart - Documentary Photography Painitng

Karl F. Stewart
Photography

Doumentary Photography Painting

Series to date involved

Impressions of Movement, San Francisco Impressions and Vanishing Beauty

Technique

All the photographs presented in this series are photo-compositions, and all images are immediately taken out of focus in the camera.

The medium is always and only photography, and each photograph documents a moment. The moment represents the time it would take to photograph a scene. This moment can be from ten minutes to more than an hour to take the images. The people and cars that had transited through the extended moment are then portrayed in a condensed moment represented by the final image.

The painting refers to the blending of the out of focus images together into a finished photograph. Any one of the final images created will have been composed from 10 to more than 25 images. Pieces of the many images taken are assembled together similar to constructing a puzzle. All work is done digitally.

Because of the technique of blurring the images used in the Impressions series, all images are made to be seen at a distance of at least 2.5 to 3 meters, for images printed 80 x 60 cm, in order to permit the viewer to focus in on the image.

Aspects of the series

There are basically three reasons why I have created this technique. For one a classic photograph frequently does not capture the world I want to see and share with others. I also want to break down the hard edged 3D reality in which we live. I soften the borders around our images so that we can possibly more easily slip into a different dimension. And finally I believe this slipping into the spaces between the edges is where our poetic vision is exalted.

This notion of spaces wishes to suggest there are two extremes at play in life - the material and the ethereal. The tension between these two aspects creates the opening where we glimpse the essence of existence. It is within these cracks in our reality that we plunge into the abyss to search for a beauty which is more than just superficial.

The Impressions images submitted are a sampling of a project I started in July 2009. The photographs taken to date are of Europe and the US. This is an ongoing project.