Introduction

Drawn to study at the Visual Studies Workshop by the work of Nathan Lyons, Ken Slosberg explored the possibilities of creating a narrative from a photographic sequence of images. The sequencing of images encourages comparisons and connections between them. The body of work he completed for his MFA final project, Flower City Winter, deals with the inner experience of traveling through spaces. This work also explores the way light and movements are recorded photographically and the effects the movement of light has on photographic emulsion.

Although the images place Slosberg is his environment at the time, they are not meant to record that environment directly, but rather his experience of moving through that environment. Even more specifically, these images mark the particular moment when he moved through the space. We can revisit a place many times but each visit is different, each moment and the way we move through the space is unique.

Don Lent, one of Slosberg’s advisors, commented on this work:

“These are autobiographical images which have a strong enough style imprint to convey the sense of an imaginary universe. They are austere but romantic in their presentation of night and glowing mists. They seem like images in process, a kind of veiled glimpse of things which we briefly see in moments of intensity. The notion of series in itself helps to express this sense of things passing; the interaction among the pictures gives a strong feeling of time.”

The images also mark their time in photographic history and practice. Like many other photographers in the 1970s, Slosberg began to bend the rules of traditional straight photography to see what expressive qualities could be recorded in the photographic image. He would hold the camera shutter open longer to allow the camera to record the movement of a person or object, sometimes to the point of obscuring the subject. In dark conditions he would record light trails by again holding the shutter open longer or moving the camera during the exposure. While he expanded boundaries with his style and working methods, he presented his work in a traditional way: black and white silver chlorobromide prints, visible frame edge, window matted in white. By maintaining these elements Slosberg was referencing and at the same time challenging the traditional training he received in the Army and what he calls the “slickness of Zone System landscapers and commercial photographers.” This juxtaposition of the more experimental and expressive image with the traditional printing illustrates beautifully the angst evident in the photography of the 1970s. Photographers were no longer required to record only what was there, yet more expressive fine art photography was just beginning to gain acceptance. This body of work explores this new freedom of subject and camera technique as well as the willingness to challenge traditional conventions.

-Romy Hosford