Highlights
Photography book
Highlights is an experiment at the intersection of the documentary genre, formalism and personal aesthetic experience. The photographs form a pattern of associative links, fishing out beautiful details from relative everyday life, escapist fantasies. Based on what lies behind the images, the author leads the viewer to a different perception of the generally accepted and unconventional aesthetic. Attention is riveted to the process of conscious observing the photographs that are filled with life and stories, prompting an emotional response.
“No art is bereft of political possibility, yet, there is a strain of representation and often politicized meaning that photography is asked to perform in the 21st Century. We are perhaps losing sight of what photography does well, which is to give form to the optical unconscious of the moment that we are asked to live, with all implications of future utopias (and now ecological dystopias) factored into the quest for relation, communication, and…personal meaning. Art will not bail us out of our problems any more than it did in 1914, 1917, 1939, 1953, 1955, 1962, 2001, 2014, 2022, etc. Photography is not a magical medium that changes the course of history. Still, it is a magical device that consumes it in real time and regurgitates it in a thick and opaque paste from which we may place our political, social, and communal projections, beliefs, and associations. Photography can provoke imagination on a scale unheralded by other artistic forms if read widely. If we know one thing, imagination is a true tool for change. By making form hostage to representation, we have abnegated the medium’s true potential to unlock new thought.”
Brad Feuerhelm
December, 2022
Separate poetic images, united by the book, outline the author’s broad range of interests; they reveal the conceptual logic of a person who has encountered beauty. Packed in a box, the book symbolically represents the skyscope, the “treasure hidden in the ground” as a way to preserve and display collections of objects dear to the heart, which took place during the author's childhood.
