Photographer Michael E Pointer is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of these images. From the ‘Pasture Survey’ series. To see Michael ’s body of work, click on any photograph.
Pasture Survey is an ongoing series exploring the rural landscape of Kansas. I grew up here and have come to love its quiet expanses, wide horizons beneath tall skies shaped by wind.
In my own cave of a darkroom, I feel connected to the earliest image makers who drew animals by torchlight on cave walls. I recognize the same need to reach beneath the visible world and reveal something essential. I use long, narrow sheets of gelatin silver paper to create photographs that echo the horizontal sweep of the Kansas skyline, where land and sky merge with memory. My work seeks to enlarge the spiritual essence of the pastured prairie.
Michael Pointer is a fourth-generation artist. He received his first camera at age nine and began working in the darkroom when he was twelve. He has won numerous awards for photography and drawing, as well as exhibiting extensively in the United States, Taiwan, and Europe. After a solo exhibit in Wichita, Kansas he was invited to teach Photography at Wichita State University, he taught there for three years. He is best known for his large-scale semi-abstract analog photography work. In 2009 Pointer lived in Afghanistan supporting a free dental clinic in Kabul and working with the Center for Contemporary Arts Afghanistan. Until recently he served CCAA as an advisory board member.
My work explores the evolving relationship between photography and painting. Rooted in a lifelong practice of drawing and painting under my artist father’s guidance, I came to photography with a painter’s sensibility. The darkroom became my studio, photo paper my canvas, and chemistry my paint. From this merging of mediums, influenced by abstract expressionism, emerged what I call Photoexpressionism. Each piece begins with an image that anchors reality and holds the truth of a moment, which I then expand through abstraction, gesture, and direct engagement with materials. Rejecting the sterile perfection of traditional black-and-white photography, I embrace spontaneity and imperfection with splashing, dragging, and layering chemistry as I would paint. Many of these gelatin silver pieces are quite large, six feet by seven feet, Id-Ego-Id is six feet by 21 feet. Each print is analog and unique, drawn exclusively from my own photographs. My influences include Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Marin—painters who pushed boundaries. From Motherwell, I learned the courage of pouring emotion onto a surface; from Rauschenberg, the freedom to experiment with collision and chance; from Marin, how to bring order to chaos. Their examples affirmed my desire to work, as Rauschenberg said, “in the gap between art and life.” Ultimately, I want viewers to experience not only the image but the surface itself, to feel the artist’s hand alive in chemistry and gesture. My work challenges photography’s boundaries, expanding its expressive and painterly possibilities.
All images and text © Michael E Pointer
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Beautiful photo, thought-provoking, mysterious, almost haunting. I love it.
Amazing
These look like paintings instead of photographs, such amazing, effect!
it looks like an art print, beautiful