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, especially after they are gone.

Over time, that feeling led me to embrace the New Topographics sensibility: a perception of the human imprint on the Earth characterized by often stark images of the everyday built environment, typically shot in a detached, "neutral," and documentary-style manner, intentionally devoid of high emotion or overt drama.

As I followed that line of exploration, I studied, and was strongly influenced by Japanese art, especially the concepts of wabi sabi (the appreciation of the beauty of the impermanent, imperfect, and incomplete -- a complete corollary to the aesthetic of the New Topographics), and ma (emptiness, the space between things, often referred to as negative space in Western art).

Light is the ch’i of the stars. Water is the blood of the Earth.

I attempt to create images of the life force in pure form using light not as mere illumination of an object, person, landscape, or whatever is in front of the camera, but as the subject itself. In its infinite, myriad interaction with water, the light becomes a reflection of ch’i, the universal life force. “To see the world in a grain of sand,” William Blake.

All my work starts with a single-exposure camera capture. I use only simple photographic tools: brightness, contrast, saturation, hue -- things I might use digitally, in analog processing, or on an enlarger in the darkroom. I like to think I'm using light like a chisel to create dimensional, sculptural images.

I sincerely ask the viewer to approach these images in the same way as they would contemplate an abstract painting. Although there are sometimes recognizable elements in the images, they are secondary to the overall abstraction. Please just allow the images to speak to you on their own terms.

This approach to photography is not new. As Minor White said, "One should not always photograph things for what they are, but for what else they are."

Thank you for allowing me to share these works with you.

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Joseph L. Akerman, 2010 - 2026.
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