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"From Mirrors,
Self Portrait and Totem"
Toned
Silver Gelatin Print
Richard K. Kent
Lancaster, PA
At age fifteen I discovered what seemed to me the
singular alchemy of black and white photography. As it has for many
others, the magic of being surprised by the photographic image has
kept me for decades intensely interested in the medium. Over the course
of thirty years making photographs, frequently I have framed or assembled
subject matter that may require the viewer to look twice either to
consider what the image really is about or to discern the nature of
the subject’s reality (actual
or fictive). Very early work that posed this sort of visual question
was achieved by printing multiple negatives, the creation of still life
compositions that included problematic elements, or an oblique framing
of the subject. Some of these compositional strategies I continue to
use because they remain relevant to what has been an abiding wonder at
the evanescence of things and our shifting, often uncertain, and at times
deeply felt response to them. Perhaps the best photographs are akin to
lyric poetry in the way they affect us. They arrest our gaze and make
something that we might take for granted once again new and sometimes
unforgettably mysterious. To picture the act of photographing reminds
us of how momentary and strange this pursuit—often of something
to hold on to—really is.
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