2025 SPE Annual Conference: Adaptations
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print this pageEvolving Vision
Douglas Prince
Friday, November 08 - 11:05AM to 11:50AM
Of all the fine art media that I studied in college, photography resonated with my creative spirit and has become a life-affirming pursuit. My creative evolution in photography is driven by my response to the environment and my curiosity about image-making processes and how these processes in turn affect my perceptions.
Photography is the tool I use to search my environment. For me, the medium is as important as the content in making an image and it is an integral part of the image making process. I have explored traditional and alternative processes with the same passion that I've explored my environment.
Beginning as a traditional "straight" photographer with medium format film cameras, I soon began to explore alternative visions: combining images in the darkroom and making photo-sculptures with images on film. In the late 1990's my photo explorations led me into digital image making.
Working in a digital media has impacted my photography in a number of areas. As a pre-digital photographer I was interested in expanding the creative process beyond the camera and straight print, into the darkroom and manipulated images; such as, the early work in the 1960's: multi-negative prints, film collages, and photo-sculptures. That same push to expand the creative potential of image making has me to appreciate the possibilities of digital image management.
Whether I'm working with the camera, in the darkroom, or on the computer, I'm looking for juxtapositions, relationships and transformations that create new perceptions, fostering an insight into the elementary nature of things. I strive to make images where the ordinary is elevated to the extraordinary. I'm looking for things that I haven't seen before.
In addition to the digital image processing, I have come to embrace the digital environment both as an image resource. Searching the world of digital images, via the web or scans of objects and books, is at this time for me, much the same process as exploring the "real" environment with a camera. Although the world of pre-existing images is two dimensional and static, it is greatly expanded in volume, speed and access to options. I find searching this area as exciting as exploring with
my camera was in the past. In both realms, I have found the quest for a basic transformative vision to be constant.
The digital revolution has transformed our visual landscape, expanding the artist's expressive freedom and increasing access for viewers. My presentation, Evolving Vision, will chart my artistic explorations as an image-maker from the film camera and darkroom to the monitor and digital print."
From a review of Prince's digital image exhibition in Art New England by Rane Hall:
"Arguably, it is their teetering between fragmentation and unification that comprises the central meaning or duality of Particles and Waves. Theirs is an unsettling balance that somehow perfectly reflects life in the digital age."
Hopefully this presentation will be instructive to students as a guide to working in digital media and exploring their own potential in creative image-making.
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