The Pueblo Regional Film Commission embraces innovation and creativity in the arts. Light painting takes digital media to a whole new level with a powerful mixture of visual and performing arts. Recently they descended upon Pueblo and explored the spaces at Watertower Place in the heart of the historic Grove neighborhood.
One of our primary objectives at Watertower Place is to encourage and foster a destination where art and engineering flourish. Recently, Watertower Place hosted Colorado Light Painting which is the largest group of its kind in the USA. Photographers, models, and painters from around the state descended on the former meat packing plant and created some powerful work which is too hard to explain with words alone.
The Origin of Light Painting
Light painting (also called light drawing) dates back to 1889 when Étienne-Jules Marey and Georges Demeny traced human motion in the first known light painting Pathological Walk From in Front.
The technique was used in Frank Gilbreth's work with his wife Lillian Moller Gilbreth in 1914, when the pair used small lights and the open shutter of a camera to track the motion of manufacturing and clerical workers.
Man Ray, in his 1935 series "Space Writing," was the first known art photographer to use the technique. He made a self-portrait with a time exposure and while the shutter was open, with a penlight he inscribed his name in cursive script in the space between him and the camera, overwriting the letters with more cryptic marks. Historian of photography Ellen Carey (*1952) describes her discovery of the artist's signature in this image while examining it in 2009.
Photographer Barbara Morgan began making light paintings in 1935-1941. Her 1941 photomontage Pure Energy and Neurotic Man incorporates light drawing and realises her stated aim; "that if I should ever seriously photograph, it would be...the flux of things. I wanted then, and still do, to express the ‘thing’ as part of total flow." In making innovative photographs of dancers, including Martha Graham and Erick Hawkins she would have them move while holding lights.
In 1949 Pablo Picasso was visited by Gjon Mili, a photographer and lighting innovator, who introduced Picasso to his photographs of ice skaters with lights attached to their skates. Immediately Picasso started making images in the air with a small flashlight in a dark room. This series of photos became known as Picasso's "light drawings." Of these photos, the most celebrated and famous is known as Picasso draws a Centaur.
Peter Keetman (1916–2005), who studied photography in Munich from 1935 to 1937, was the 1949 co-founder of FotoForm (together with Otto Steinert, Toni Schneiders et al.), a group with great impact on the new photography in the 50s and 60s in Germany and abroad. He produced a series Schwingungsfigur (oscillating figures) of complex linear meshes, often with moiré effects, using a point-source light on a pendulum.
During the 1970s and 80's Eric Staller used this technology for numerous photo projects that were called "Light Drawings". Light paintings up to 1976 are classified as light drawings.
In 1977 Dean Chamberlain extended the technique using handheld lights to selectively illuminate and/or colour parts of the subject or scene with his image Polyethylene Bags On Chaise Longue at The Rochester Institute of Technology. Dean Chamberlain was the first artist to dedicate his entire body of work to the light painting art form. The artist photographer Jacques Pugin made several series of images with the light drawing technique in 1979. Now, with modern light painting, one uses more frequently choreography and performance to photograph and organize.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Steve Mann invented, designed, built, and used various wearable computers to visualize real-world phenomena such as sound waves, radio waves, and sight fields by light painting using computational photography.
Since the 1980s, Vicki DaSilva has been working exclusively in light painting and light graffiti. In 1980, DaSilva started making deliberate text light graffiti works, the first being "Cash". She continued these light graffiti photographs throughout the 1980s and eventually started using 4 foot fluorescent bulbs hooked up to pulley systems to create sheets of light. In the early 2000s she began making work with 8 foot fluorescent lamps, holding the lamp vertically and walking through spaces with it.
From the late 1980s Tokihiro Satō's photographs combine light, time and space in recording his movements in a series beginning with his “photo respirations” where his use of an 8 x 10-inch view camera fitted with a strong neutral-density filter to achieve lengthy exposures lasting one to three hours provide the opportunity for him to move through the landscape. When shooting in daylight, with a mirror he flashed light from the sun into the camera lens, resulting in points of light and flares that punctuate the image and track his movements, though his presence is not seen directly. For nocturnal or interior views he “draws” with a small torch.
Light painting as an artform enjoyed a surge in popularity in the 21st century, partly due to the increasing availability of dSLR cameras and mobile phone cameras enabling immediate feedback for adjustments of lights and exposure; advances in portable light sources such as LEDs; and the advent of media sharing websites by which practitioners can exchange images and ideas.
In March 2007, JanLeonardo coined the term light art performance photography (LAPP) which emphasises the performative aspect that is evident earlier in Satō's work, and used it to describe the creation of new figures and structures only with light. Following the original Greek meaning of Photography (Greek φῶς, phos, genetive: φωτός, photos, "light" (of the luminary), "brightness" and γράφειν, graphein, "drawing", "carve", "create", "write") it is a symbiosis of light art and photography. The main difference from other light painting or light writing, it has been claimed, is the role of the background in the photo.[clarification needed] Locations in the natural landscape or amongst buildings, such as industrial ruins, are carefully researched for distinctive backgrounds for each composition and LED-lamps are often used for contrasting cold and warm light to emphasise the existing structures. Collaboration is usually required in the performance of the work, with one person creating light figures and structures while the other operates the camera. In collaboration with Jörg Miedza, JanLeonardo founded the project LAPP-PRO.de that further developed the technique until in 2011, the pair disassociated. LAPP has grown internationally since its inception.
Light Painting at Watertower Place
Artist Paul Burns. (see works below) led the first group of light painting creatives at Watertower Place. Since then Watertower Place has hosted a variety of painters who continue to expand our understanding of the art form and the many applications that can be considered to achieve a heightened understanding of creativity and self-awareness.
