It seems like I’ve had a camera in my hand as long as I can remember. I got my first camera, a Kodak 127 Brownie Starmite, when I was 12. I recall wanting to capture the people and places I experienced so I could hold onto those memories, those faces that even then I realized would be gone one day. I hoped to remember always what it was like to be in a particular place at a particular moment. Thinking about the history of photography, this has always been one of its greatest appeals: to preserve our past and the people we loved.

But then sometimes, the pictures “didn’t turn out.” I was disappointed initially, but the more I looked at these “failures”, the more I realized that the “flaws” sometimes created images that more evocatively captured my experience of these people, places and events, and they expressed something deeper and more resonant to me than a straightforward recording of whatever it was. Turned out, the imperfections were often the compass that pointed the way to a path of deeper expression. The limitations of the photographic process are themselves tools of creation.

Now I use the camera to capture light. Not in the sense of light across a subject’s face, or the shadows through an open window, or the sensuous shapes of a model or still life delicately lit, but the light itself. The patterns of the life energy, from a surface or from reflections or whatever it is, become the subject. Using simple adjustments (brightness, contrast, saturation, hue) I move the image into the abstract, into the realm of pure ch’i.

People ask, “what’s that a picture of?” It seems that once someone can place a name, a label, on the subject of the photo, then they don’t need to think about that image any longer, as if they are perhaps avoiding looking into themselves for the true meaning of it, rather that to confront the more difficult and interesting question: “What feeling does that image evoke in you?”

I seek to convey an experience that cannot be named or labeled, because it is not the person or place or object in front of the lens that is important, but the thoughts, memories and feelings the resultant image will draw out of the viewer. These are the images that will make us turn our vision inward and examine ourselves, which is the way to the greater truth. In this way, I hope to learn what’s inside me, and by so doing to learn sometimes, perhaps, what’s in all of us.

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Joseph L. Akerman, 2010 - 2023.
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