ARTIST’S STATEMENT

In the mid-1920’s and into the 1930’s Alfred Stieglitz, photography pioneer, husband of Georgia O’Keefe, and champion of photography as an art form, made a series of cloud photographs he called Equivalents. His thinking was that photography wasn’t merely an art relegated to recording things but a medium capable of transmitting pure emotions, freed from any specific subject matter. Photography was capable of achieving a higher level of art.

A century later, amid a technical revolution in the way images are produced, viewed, and shared, doubts are growing about photography, about its purpose, about its vitality. We may need reminding that photography is still capable of those deeper complexities, still capable of reaching to pure emotions without specific reference to subject matter. That photography can still achieve that higher level of art.

The time was right to remake Stieglitz’s series. I started by gathering images of nebula photographed by space telescopes. Then, one by one, hour after hour, day after day, I removed the stars.

It was like looking Stieglitz straight in the eye.
ARTIST’S BIO

Darin Boville was born in Akron, Ohio in 1965. He attended the University of Akron and Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government where he specialized in government policy toward science and technology. He has been exhibiting his work since the mid-1980s and was a pioneer in the mid-1990s in using the developing Internet as a means of sharing art with a geographically dispersed audience. His work tends to concentrate on themes related to technology, history and current events, and art itself.

He lives is the small, seaside town of Montara, California with his wife and two daughters