In 2003 I began abstracting the female figure in photographs using a blur technique done in camera with one exposure. It has since expanded to
include travel photography and portraiture. In 2006 I traveled to Italy and
applied the blur to travel photographs as a means of constructing a more personal
vision of what I saw. I need to thwart my own cliché notions I have about well traveled
locations while at the same time pushing the boundaries of my own work.
The premise of the work is to photograph common destinations around the globe
and return with uncommon results, something other than predictable souvenir
snapshots. The work is more about a memory of place as it might exist in my own thoughts
without the minute detail normally seen in a photograph. At times, the
work feels like a day dream, a moving meditation when I sense the energy and
vibration of the moment both when I create the work and when I view it.
The biggest limitation in photography for me is that the subject has to exist in the
real world. The subject can’t be a figment of my imagination like it is in a
painting or drawing. The camera can’t take a picture of the images I see in my
mind’s eye and that frustrates my creative process and motivated this body of work.
The work here is a step away from the physical world of infinite details toward the imagined world of infinite fantasy with its own reality
somewhere in between those two ideas.
--Ty Bowman