City Lights

In the fall of 2009, some 30 years after I got my glasses, I started, for the first time ever, to think about my myopia. Could there be a positive side in being nearsighted? This far, I thought, it has mostly been a burden, more or less. So, one late dark fall evening as I was taking a stroll in my home town I stopped and took of my glasses to really look at what I was seeing without any extra lenses. Sure I have seen this before, but now I looked at it with an idea, with a thought, with a need to understand. And I saw light bubbles, lots of light bubbles and colours of all sorts. It was a beautiful abstraction of light. This I can shoot, I said to myself and began taking a lot of unsharp images. Now, this happened about half a year after I began experimenting with in-camera multiple exposures. To my myopic images the multiple exposures provided a way to enhance the richness of the abstract, or to put it simply: to get more bubbles in the images I shot. Then one late winter evening, a few months later, as I walked home from a pub, a thought popped into my mind. What if I combine the light bubbles with a focused image? So, as I usually have my camera with me all the time, I took some multiple exposures with one sharp and a some unsharp images on top of each other. I was taken aback: There was something in these images beyond the combination of the sharp and the unsharp. It was something I had never seen before. This combination created a strange experience of something more, something additional. It was nothing one sees in everyday life and therefore a bit magical. The images are very ambiguous and open for the viewer to make a wide array of interpretations. I love these images, and I understand them from a maker's point of view, but I do not understand them in such a way that I could explain what happens when the sharp and the unsharp is combined. I have tried to explain the City Light images, but to no avail. The multiple exposure is a tool to tap into the cubistic view of presenting a subject from several points of views, in this case the myopic and visual acuity, but what does it mean? To me it is all photography, these images could not have been done any other way. This is a way for me to conceive my environment and explore both looking and seeing, that is my intent. Others may well experience something else.