Ted Hiebert-August 2009- Artist of the Month!

The first photograph was a sunburn – as has been every photograph since – scars of light burning away the possibilities of shadow, the possibilities of darkness, the possibilities of the imaginary itself. It was Susan Sontag who proposed that the camera is a predatory weapon of sorts, but it was the artist Evergon who put it more aptly by suggesting that the camera is, in actual fact, a coffin of darkness, the last stand of captured night against the tortures of illuminated living.

My work explores this relationship between darkness and the imagination, mobilizing the codes of photographic representation for their material, psychological and delusional possibilities. If photography under the sign of light is mythologized as that which steals souls, my work attempts to answer the question of whether it can also give them back, not through strict representational construction but just the opposite – it is the non-representational potential of photography that I find most compelling.

Consider, for instance, that while it is common practice to refer to photography as a "writing with light" – a vision-based illumination of image – there is an equally powerful, though less commonly articulated inverse side to photography, namely a debt to darkness – both through the protective shell of the camera, and in the light-deprived experience of darkroom processing. Here, it is precisely not vision that governs, but touch – as film is developed in the night-time blind of tactile awareness. And this has an optical counterpoint too, since the blind spot of vision (where the optic nerve penetrates the retina) is equally a location of imaginative "filling in" – where there is darkness there exist the possibilities of an undiscovered, but always nevertheless present, imagination.
http://www.tedhiebert.net