Alan Klug

Monochromatic images are by their very nature unrealistic in the everyday sense – abstract in their absence of color. Black and white film sees a world we cannot, though we can train the mind to approximate a gray-scale vision of a natural scene. Photographing the unseen, infrared range of light can magnify abstraction, as can very long exposures, yielding images that reflect the artist's dream world more than objective reality. Recognizing these motivations in my own work, I have been concerned lately to make an image which distances itself even farther from the objective view by its owing almost nothing to a particular locale, an abstract universal, an attempt to show not what something looks like, but what it feels like. The pictures I want to make are those of reserve and quietness, of "suchness", pictures that invite meditation.

Monochromatic images are by their very nature unrealistic in the everyday sense, abstract in their absence of color. Black and white film sees a world we cannot, though we can train the mind to approximate a gray-scale vision of a natural scene. Photographing the unseen, infrared range of light can magnify abstraction, as can very long exposures, yielding images that reflect the artist's dream world more than objective reality. Recognizing these motivations in my work, I have been concerned lately to make an image which distances itself even farther from the objective view by its owing almost nothing to a particular locale, an abstract universal, an attempt to show not what something looks like, but what it feels like. The pictures I want to make are those of reserve and quietness, of "suchness", pictures that invite meditation.