Jason R. Carroll
Dec. 2001 Color Portfolio: "Dream Life"
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Click on an image to enlarge it.

All images have been digitized to faithfully represent the original prints. Original prints are manually produced by me on 20"x16" Fuji Crystal Archive Type C paper, enlarged from 35mm negatives shot on a 1982 Nikon FG camera.
 


Statement

I thought I was simply looking for geometry--patterns in the order and chaos of the world. I wanted to make images of patterns. However, as in most human endeavors the subconscious tends to take us in directions that are independent of our intentions. I tried not to fight this.

It seems now that what I actually did was find secrets, not patterns. I found things I didn't know were there before, because I looked at, through and into certain essences. I won't pretend that I knew what I was doing--many times this all happened by accident. Over time I also found myself looking deep inside places, both physical and metaphysical, that were important to me. Doing this implicitly meant looking inside myself, although again, this was unknown to me at the time. I found these places lonely, but comforting in their loneliness. Perhaps this is what people refer to as "solitude."

Technically, I tended to make images of very layered spatial situations, partly because the aesthetics of these situations pleased me and partly because I was trying to get away from my tendency to focus on objects. Sometimes I felt like I made the images and sometimes I felt like the images made themselves--I simply followed the light, literally, and found them, like a game. I "captured" them.

I'm beginning to understand what the images mean. Looking back on this initial body of work, some feelings of longing and solitude are visible. I see a naïve view of the world as I wish it would be, but rarely is. I see my curiosity about the lives of other people--I wish I could make a cross-section of the entire planet and see all of the beautiful human activity occurring at any given time. To see sideways, where walls once were, into all of those incandescently lit rooms in the early evening, that's what I'd like to do, just once. I sometimes see myself as an outsider looking in, who often won't come in even when invited. I see myself as someone struggling to articulate my value in the world.

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