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Martin J.Waterman
1-877-254-9665
martin@mjwaterman.com
www.mjwaterman.com
I am a fine art and commercial photographer living and working in Southern California. I seek to illuminate the extraordinary in the ordinary and to use photography as a tool to suspend time, by allowing the viewer to take the time necessary to be immersed in the picture and fully absorb the emotional responses the picture invokes. I also hope to use my photography to challenge our conventional perceptions and programmed responses, to provoke us to look around and beyond our carefully constructed blinders. To set aside our preconceived notions of what is beautiful, and open our eyes to something that we would normally reject without looking at, without ever really seeing.
While wandering the magnificent and mysterious deserts of Southern California I began documenting the ruins of structures people had left behind when they abandoned some location for one reason or another. I've always been fascinated by decay, and here was decay working on a large scale. While photographing the exteriors, I found myself becoming increasingly fascinated by the interiors of the structures I was shooting. In some cases it seemed as though the people living in them had just gotten up and walked away, abandoning everything behind - pictures, clothes, mementos. And these interiors seemed to hold some trace, some echo of their past inhabitants. I found them to be achingly beautiful and I had to attempt to capture them.
Some of these locations provided me with the perfect canvases to pursue another project. Whenever man strives to alter nature, nature immediately starts to work, usually on a small scale, to destroy man's false constructs, and return the environment to a natural state. All too often we never pause to view that small world, and see these beautiful images These pictures are macro abstracts of the random and changing patterns that natures agent, decay, has painted on the debris man left behind.
Some of the images here are from a project called "A Black and White L. A. Night". I am striving to capture the Downtown Los Angeles that most of us never see as we pass thru the downtown area on the 110 or the 101 freeways. When I first conceived this project I thought that it couldn't be done, that there wouldn't be enough light, but as I proceeded I realized that downtown was awash with light from myriad sources. There was hard and soft light, direct, reflected, and ambient light, bright and faint light, and always the dark seeking to recapture those small islands of illumination. It was truly a revelation. I've always seen black and white photography as being about the elements in the picture, about lines and angles and the perpendicular meeting the parallel. L.A. Night is about capturing the hard lines of what is lit meeting the hidden lines and gradients of what is in shadow.
In 2004 and 2005 I was awarded 1st Place for Fine Art in the prestigious national juried competition for new photography at the Millard Sheets Gallery. In the fall of 2004 I started the Lens Fusion photography group with photographer S. J. Schulman for the purpose of promoting alternative photography processes. My work has been exhibited in juried exhibitions at the Riverside Art Museum, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, the Palos Verdes Art Center, M. J. Higgins Fine Art, numerous other gallery shows, and is in private collections across the United States and in Europe. I do all of my own printing in the darkroom from my original negatives in signed and numbered limited editions and no digital processes of any kind are used at any stage in the reproduction of these images.
Exhibitions 2010
2010 Future Studio Gallery, Highland Park, CA (Solo Show)
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* None of the artworks may be copied or reproduced without the written permission of the Artist