Ernest Kafka Photography

Eye of the Beholder

When I see something that gives me a feeling that it might lead to a good picture, I photograph it. I look at a largish number of prints and throw away most of them. A few, I take to a darkroom where I can experiment. I find great pleasure in tweaking colors and crops, at first with film and more recently with digital techniques. At a certain point in the process, I realize that I have come upon a result that gives me a remarkable and surprising feeling of discovering something that had eluded the language of words. I may like something that comes out of this process or not.

An artist’s work is conceived by the artist and interpreted by the viewer. The larger part of the conception and perception cannot be translated into words. A work of art expresses the ineffable. Subjective idiosyncratic visual and other unconscious associations play a large part in what is made by the author and experienced in the response of the audience.

Photographs evoke hard to define sensations in me. Puzzlement, mystery, anxiety and wonder are words which are suggestive of the feelings that these images provoke. Ideas naturally follow and they generally have to do with the photograph as a representation of both a moment in time and of timelessness. Seemingly counter-intuitive, but true. The image suggests stories about that moment of capturing the subject on film and gives me a chance to examine and think about what might have come before and after that particular instant.

This reaction is similar to that which I have in response to music, even though music is abstract and exists only in passing time while photographs are concrete representations that exist only in fixed space. In some synaesthetic way, in my mind, somehow both art forms inhabit both dimensions. The music is always playing, the world is always in flux, and at any given moment, I can focus on the unheard sounds and hear the music and also stop the movement of the world and capture its stillness.

I am often attracted by mists, clouds, dusk and dawns, passages, remnants of the past, signs of seasonal change, animals and people either at contemplative rest or in movement as if motivated by a quest and not by a clear purpose. I am looking for something subtle, ambiguous and only partially attainable like the uncertainty of life amidst birth, change, development, cognitive dissonance, paradox and life and death itself.

At the least, I want the image of the wall to be a good picture to which viewers respond by feeling that looking was worth the effort. If viewers finds themselves having an ambiguous, suggestive, contemplative, questing experience similar to mine as a result of having contact with the work, I believe that this Quixotic effect approaches what art is meant to do and what I intend the work to inspire in others who would care to look at my images.

I find that this feeling tends to come about when I look at work that has particular characteristics. The images that move me the most seem to ones that emphasize light and shadow, mist and clarity, and represent something of special and un-posed natural beauty, often with humor, in the arrangement of shapes, things and colors that I and others might not have noticed before.

I hope that you may respond to some of my work in a similar way.