Social Distancing

Greg Anthon is a fine art photographer from NYC area. Artist Statement: In my work I seek to reduce an image to its bare essentials: a gestalt, a gesture, a shadow. What is the minimum information necessary to generate the image of a person, and what visual details elicit an emotional response in the viewer? Scientific studies suggest that our brains tend to compensate for missing information by a phenomenon called “filling in”. The less information contained in an image, the more a viewer is invited to “fill in” with their own experience. (For the same reason, image titles are also kept vague.) To create these photographs, I use the camera like a paintbrush: I shoot with long exposure times with the movement of the subject during the exposure generating a painterly feel. I trace the influences to a variety of artists: the ephemeral photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, the bold abstract forms in the work of Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline, and possible homage to folk artists such as Bill Traylor. Now however the pandemic has forced me indoors where I quickly became stir-crazy. In this “Social Distancing” series I have created photo constructs in my studio which I then rephotographed again with long exposure times to generate these abstractions. Looking over the series I feel the images express ambiguities many of us are feeling: a sense of uncertainty, loss of context, isolation, ambivalence, yet at the same time a tabula rasa for the next development. In my practice I like to print large (40”x60”), and often on aluminum so that without a matte or frame the image appears to float against the background.