I’m in the CONTACT Photography Festival for 2024, the annual, city-wide photography exhibition around Toronto every may. It is my first solo show in years, and it is my first entry into CONTACT.
The show will be a retrospective of my current style, “luminous realism.” The style name come from how I create images; when I digitally process my images, I take the image luminance down throughout the image and then brush it back in locally. It’s a bit like watercolour painting in reverse, without the mess and frustration (at least for me – I was never good at watercolours). And that doesn’t even begin to delve into the Platonist elements that undergird my work (which I blab about here, here, and here).
and will feature works from many of the places I’ve been shooting since 2017: Toronto, Scotland, New Orleans, Jasper, and Costa Rica. It also includes a piece of black-and-white, long-exposure photography, from which my current style evolved.
As always these days, all of the images are printed big – 40×60 inches, or in the case of one, 60×60 inches. You get the IMAX version of my images, way more immersive than you can get on a computer screen (or, gods forbid, a phone – it’s like listening to your favourite music as a 96kbps mp3, it’s just painful).
The show, which will be at the Elaine Fleck Gallery at 1351 Queen St West in Toronto, will run from May 1-31, with a reception on May 4 from 2-4 pm. Visit the CONTACT Photography Festival website for more information, and RSVP the Elaine Fleck Gallery if you want to attend the reception.