MEET THE ARTIST
Free Event: Sunday February 3, 7:00pm
Sunday, February 3
7:00 pm (60 mins)
Furman Gallery
If dance is movement through the air, photography is a kind of movement through the mind. Filmmaking retains the motion of dance and the air space, through which it happens, but the still camera fixes everything, all motion included, in the moment the shutter fires. Obviously.
With photographs, the joys or sorrows of what just happened or the surprise or delight of what comes next is completely erased. We can only imagine the before and after, invent them in our minds. The actions that might have been and could follow are unknown as they are unseen. But that erasure of past and future is exactly where the excitement of photography resides, the lock-down in the present, leaving the viewer to invent the bookends of any single moment’s
before and
after.
In
A Dance of Light, I trust the viewer to provide his or her own choreography. How did the hands come up out of the snow? Did the cliff edge crumble and give way after the shutter clicked? Well, I’m here so that, thank God, didn’t happen. In all of the works, as the surrounding light shapes and holds the moment and place still in time, I try to discover the posture through which magic might happen. I can never be sure because I am never behind the camera. For me, for these last 42 years now, it always has been a dance of happenstance.
© Arno Rafael Minkkinen, 2013
Catch Arno Rafael Minkkinen’s photo exhibit Furman Gallery, A Dance of Light: Forty-Years of Self-Portraits
Catch the screening of excerpts for Arno Rafael Minkkinen’s upcoming film The Rain Dance
Image: ©Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Fosters Pond 1989. Courtesy Barry Friedman Ltd.
