Joe Johnson
Boston, MA
photography
Fire Escape with Flower Pot, 2005, C-print, 40” x 40”, Lent by the Artist
Joe Johnson’s color photographs capture urban landscapes at night. Using only available light from street lamps and windows, Johnson seeks out the vertical forms of city architecture, producing dramatic and often cinematic images.
"I’m standing on the roof of this building above Manhattan’s Upper West Side, looking east through a camera, and it hits me…within this single frame, by the sum of the lit windows alone, I can represent the entire population of my hometown in Kansas.
For me this realization underlined an intriguing creative problem: How do I make pictures of architecture that have less to do with buildings and more to do with people? I noticed that particularly after dark, structures bore a relationship to the living and breathing organisms within, an accumulation of individual lives stacked upon one another. This shift in my perception of space has motivated this work.
An elevated view allowed me to access a greater variety of picture possibilities; it also gave the pictures this ambiguous and disorienting sense of where one might stand. Thus I can situate the city within a fictive context, an elaborate stage set where both shared and individual experience is performed." —Joe Johnson
Please join the artist for a Gallery Talk on Saturday, May 20, 2006, at 3 pm.
