Description
Hardcover, 12×10 inches, 128 pages, 122 color photographs by Craig Blacklock, Introduction by Daile Kaplan.
A century ago Alfred Stieglitz turned his Graflex camera skyward, freeing images of clouds from the contextualizing anchor of land creating his “Equivalents” series, which many cite as the first abstract photographs.
Forty years later, Wynn Bullock created his groundbreaking series, Color Light Abstractions, with sweeping patterns reminiscent of Stieglitz’s Equivalents. Bullocks’ subject matter was light, transmitted, refracted, and reflected through and from fractured glass arranged in his studio.
Now, only recently made possible through advances in digital photography and editing technology, Craig Blacklock has built upon these historic works, creating a fusion of the two in his LIGHT WAVES photographs. Like Stieglitz, Blacklock is photographing wind-driven patterns in nature, with his beloved Lake Superior supplanting Stieglitz’s clouds while embracing Bullock’s fascination and mastery of color and light.
With LIGHT WAVES, Blacklock extends an abstraction of the lakescape first begun with his Horizons series, stating, “Light Waves is a response to the fracturing of our planet’s ecosystems at the dawn of the Anthropocene Epoch…” The often disorienting results mirror our difficulty in maintaining our equilibrium in a time of unprecedented change.
Blacklock gathered images from around the lake and from its largest island, Isle Royale, unlocking a portal into an astonishing universe where light dancing with water creates the illusion of three-dimensional objects and spaces “…simultaneously acknowledging changes and loss, while also revealing the beauty remaining to be discovered within the shards, providing a place of refuge.”
This book is published upon the occasion of an exhibition of selected photographs from it at the Palm Beach Photographic Centre’s Museum.
November 11, 2022—January 7, 2023.
