Info
After World War II my left liberal Jewish New Yorker parents settled on a farm, not back-to-the-land, just making a break with family–starting off on their own. At subsequent Seders in the City we were the hicks who had nearly fallen off the back edge of Saul Steinberg’s map. So not surprisingly, in 1969 during my senior year at college, I turned in my 2-S deferment as a marker of privilege and was quickly drafted into the US Army. But the Army found that it didn’t care for anti-war agitators–two years later, my Bad Conduct Discharge in hand, I was free.
Photography came early and late, straddling marriage, children, careers and thirty years of the accumulated observations of an outlander–wet black and white in the 1970’s and dry digital color in 2005.
For me, a photograph transcends its surrogate nature by delineating the unseen, the unnoticed, the unappreciated. As a document infused with subjective knowledge, it can have a profound impact, both aesthetically and as an antidote to our aloof alienation from the physical world, thus helping to rebuild the integrity of our senses and lending some coherence to our thoughts. Restoring a link between humans and the animate world is an initial step toward the rebalancing of our relationship with the earth and its other inhabitants.
I work with large format images. Everything about them is large: the number of pixels, the size of the files, the dimensions of the prints. However, these large format photographs are composed of many very small details: the threads in a seat cushion, the label on a window, the pattern of bricks in a wall.
The perception of these myriad elements draws me outward. The images I create document each of these details, the relationships between them, and them and me. If the image is clean, decisive and honest it can also be a vehicle to immerse the viewer, initiating a transcendence of the flat two-dimensional photographic world–an enlargement of experience.
All of my images are highly manipulated. First, they are all stitched together on a computer from individual 35 millimeter shots (see the Technique page, heathpaleyphoto.com/technique.html). Then there are many hours of layers, masks and adjustments in Photoshop*, time spent counteracting the impact of the mechanical personality of the camera, which modifies and distracts from my original vision. Ansel Adams defined a photographic print as an, “Equivalent…the image created later.”
My goal is the creation of Equivalents in which the picture’s elements–the settling, the people, the light–transcend the details of the particular scene and push me and push the viewer toward a further awareness of the modern human experience and into a closer connection with the animate world–not some idealized or natural version–but the world we pass through daily. I want Equivalents that expose the unfamiliarity of the commonplace and thus momentarily shatter our habitual way of seeing and feeling.
These images are being offered in signed, limited editions of 10 prints. Unless otherwise arranged, they are printed on Epson Exhibition Fiber Paper (325 GSM) using an Epson Stylus Pro 9900 printer and the Epson HDR pigment ink set. The provenance of each print (i.e., the printer, ink, and paper used as well as the image size and the print date) will be listed on the lower-right corner of the back of the print.
All of these prints can be printed in a smaller size as long as the proportion between the width and the height remains the same. If you would like a print in a smaller size, it will be priced accordingly. To order a custom sized print please contact me via email or phone.
All of the images on this site are displayed in sRGB, which has a fairly limited color gamut (the range of colors contained within the color space), but which is also the only color space automatically recognized by most computer monitors. The image files are actually stored and worked on in LAB, which is the color space with the largest color gamut. This means that the printed versions of these images will have a larger range of color then the images displayed on this site. The resolution of the printed images is also much finer. The images are displayed at 72 dpi (dots per inch), but the images are printed at a minimum of 300 dpi, so the printed versions will contain much finer detail then those that are displayed here. This disparity in resolution is due to the fact that the vast majority of computer monitors are not capable of displaying resolutions greater than 72 dpi.
I welcome any comments or questions that you might have about the images shown here. You can contact me at: heath@heathpaleyphoto.com
Heath Paley
My contact information:
By email: info@heathpaleyphoto.com
By standard mail:
Heath Paley
34 Titcomb Lane
Arundel, Maine 04046
By phone:207.756.9512
*Photoshop is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems, Inc.
Photography came early and late, straddling marriage, children, careers and thirty years of the accumulated observations of an outlander–wet black and white in the 1970’s and dry digital color in 2005.
For me, a photograph transcends its surrogate nature by delineating the unseen, the unnoticed, the unappreciated. As a document infused with subjective knowledge, it can have a profound impact, both aesthetically and as an antidote to our aloof alienation from the physical world, thus helping to rebuild the integrity of our senses and lending some coherence to our thoughts. Restoring a link between humans and the animate world is an initial step toward the rebalancing of our relationship with the earth and its other inhabitants.
I work with large format images. Everything about them is large: the number of pixels, the size of the files, the dimensions of the prints. However, these large format photographs are composed of many very small details: the threads in a seat cushion, the label on a window, the pattern of bricks in a wall.
The perception of these myriad elements draws me outward. The images I create document each of these details, the relationships between them, and them and me. If the image is clean, decisive and honest it can also be a vehicle to immerse the viewer, initiating a transcendence of the flat two-dimensional photographic world–an enlargement of experience.
All of my images are highly manipulated. First, they are all stitched together on a computer from individual 35 millimeter shots (see the Technique page, heathpaleyphoto.com/technique.html). Then there are many hours of layers, masks and adjustments in Photoshop*, time spent counteracting the impact of the mechanical personality of the camera, which modifies and distracts from my original vision. Ansel Adams defined a photographic print as an, “Equivalent…the image created later.”
My goal is the creation of Equivalents in which the picture’s elements–the settling, the people, the light–transcend the details of the particular scene and push me and push the viewer toward a further awareness of the modern human experience and into a closer connection with the animate world–not some idealized or natural version–but the world we pass through daily. I want Equivalents that expose the unfamiliarity of the commonplace and thus momentarily shatter our habitual way of seeing and feeling.
These images are being offered in signed, limited editions of 10 prints. Unless otherwise arranged, they are printed on Epson Exhibition Fiber Paper (325 GSM) using an Epson Stylus Pro 9900 printer and the Epson HDR pigment ink set. The provenance of each print (i.e., the printer, ink, and paper used as well as the image size and the print date) will be listed on the lower-right corner of the back of the print.
All of these prints can be printed in a smaller size as long as the proportion between the width and the height remains the same. If you would like a print in a smaller size, it will be priced accordingly. To order a custom sized print please contact me via email or phone.
All of the images on this site are displayed in sRGB, which has a fairly limited color gamut (the range of colors contained within the color space), but which is also the only color space automatically recognized by most computer monitors. The image files are actually stored and worked on in LAB, which is the color space with the largest color gamut. This means that the printed versions of these images will have a larger range of color then the images displayed on this site. The resolution of the printed images is also much finer. The images are displayed at 72 dpi (dots per inch), but the images are printed at a minimum of 300 dpi, so the printed versions will contain much finer detail then those that are displayed here. This disparity in resolution is due to the fact that the vast majority of computer monitors are not capable of displaying resolutions greater than 72 dpi.
I welcome any comments or questions that you might have about the images shown here. You can contact me at: heath@heathpaleyphoto.com
Heath Paley
My contact information:
By email: info@heathpaleyphoto.com
By standard mail:
By phone:
*Photoshop is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems, Inc.