Friday, July 1, 2011

July 4th.




We all take firework pictures but not many as successful as those by Pierre LeHors, a young American (in spite of the name) photographer I was introduced to by David Strettel of Dashwood Books.

I was looking for some unusual pictures for a client's summer house and Strettel pointed out LeHors' book "Firework Studies".

As LeHors says in his artist's statement, "By constraining nearly all tonal values to stark blacks and pure whites, the trails, explosions and clouds of debris are reduced to a series of simple repeated formal elements: arced lines, spherical bursts, and randomly dispersed particles. i made no effort to limit digital artifacts resulting from pushing the image files past their conventional range; the resulting noise becomes hard to distinguish from the texture of the fireworks themselves."

We ended up selecting a group of 8 to hang in a grid, but rather than print them photographically LeHors chose to make silkscreens of each image thereby pushing the tonal values and painterly qualities even further. Anyway, it worked out really well and if you're interested, the book can be purchased at Dashwood. Just click here.

And happy 4th!











5 comments:

Letterpress said...

Interesting take on fireworks which we usually always associate with color, not value. This gives me an idea to shoot Monday's hoopla in black/white and see what happens.

Happy Fourth to you!

Alice Olive said...

Beautiful. Love the black and white - makes the fireworks look so much more delicate.

Fancy Dress said...

I love fireworks! I see fireworks usually on new years day. Their explosive and bright colors symbolize joy and prosperity.

dontbuymake said...

SO BEAUTIFUL AND UNEXPECTED. I WANT PRINTS!

dalit said...

take away colors from fireworks... sounds wrong - but feels so right and fresh when you see the photos! thinking out of the box just does it.