“Water”, published in the Winter 2015 issue of Agave Magazine. Beneath the photo is my long-winded ‘Artist’s Statement’, which was encouraged by the Editor-in-Chief, Ariana Lyriotakis.

Water

 

Instantly familiar, new to the eye–if I’ve done it right, this is how I describe my photography. I rarely take more than one shot of a subject, concentrating instead on the correct composition from the beginning. I generally shoot or bracket several exposures of that same frame of the subject. In post-process, those individual exposures are layered, then color temperature, saturation, contrast, and other values are manipulated, full and/or partial masks applied, and individual features are tone-mapped or ‘painted’ in or out of the scene. All objects are found objects, as are the emotions they stir in us. A thing gets our attention, be it a building in a certain light, or a thought about that building in a certain light, or the thoughts we imagine of a person entering that building in a certain light. We may use a keyboard, a paintbrush, a lens, a chisel or a hammer, or a cursor on the drawing stage of a pixelated canvas to reveal it, explore it, interpret it, and present it to others. The process enables us to discover what it does to us. Sometimes I write about what I see; other times, I reach for a camera. To me, photography and writing are the same. In both, when the work is done, it speaks. Not one more pixel needs filtering, not one more word can find a place there.

-Dave Petraglia