Title: Parrot Tulip I
Image size: 8"x8" on 11"x14" paper
Created 1997, printed 2009
Medium: Archival pigment print on Crane Museo Max paper; Epson 3800
Edition of 50
Price: $220.
I am drawn to the perfection of the formal beauties inherent in the human body and in flowers. I use black and white film to concentrate each image to its most abstract form—and then I paint it to energize it visually according to my own imagination. I am moved by the ways in which the force of the imagination colors everyday life—creates, in fact, private views of experience, whether revealed in words or in images.
The imagination colors what we see—both literally and figuratively. And seeing, of course, is everything in photography: seeing—and light and shadow. From a huge range of images we select certain ones—or pieces—from a certain perspective, with the light at a certain angle. The colors we see are the result of the convergence of both optical and psychological circumstances at that point of encounter. And in that ephemeral moment, I find the tension and the exhilaration in photography.
Brigitte Carnochan’s painted gelatin silver photographs have been widely exhibited—recently at Modernbook Gallery in Palo Alto and Gallery 291 in San Francisco, where she also showed her photographic series, Imagining Then: A Family Story, 1941-47, featured in the Jan-Feb 2009 issue of Lenswork Magazine and in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. More information available: brigittecarnochan.com and imaginingthen.com.
