​About Jonathan Pazer

 ABOUT / ​About

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EKPHRASIS -
​PHOTOGRAPHY INSPIRES POETRY

In the wind and fog or at the ocean's edge, high above the crash of the waves, these are  moments that I am drawn to experience, and share.

Photography is at base capturing light, the light shed upon the world of our experience. But the raw pixels of a photo are rarely a stopping place for me. I'm interested in exploring how I felt when I took the image, and less about showing the viewer an exact representation of the scene. 

My photographs are often: abstract, or soft, or dreamy fantasies, because that's how I felt. I use techniques like ICM, intentional camera movement, where the camera is in motion when the image is taken, creating a wide variety of blurring and blending in an image. I like long exposures for how they portray time in photos in a way that is not normally visible in everyday life.

​Then often the finished image is a starting place for a poem, written explicitly for the picture itself. This process of ekphrasis, exploring one medium of art through another medium, derives its name from the ancient Greek. In its purest form ekphrasis was poetry about sculpture or sculpture about poetry.

Poetry is also about exploration and my poetry has always flowed from dreams, and day to day life and from my underlying and powerful sense of the meaningfulness of existence and of the natural world.

My ekphrastic poetry grew out of my early process for naming my images. I would take a long time, and have an entire inner conversation with the piece and then condense that into a name. I realized that my journey into the picture  in search of its title was quintessentially a poetic one, and I began writing down the poems and not just their titles.

I believe that viewers should be free to view the image through their own emotional imagination, and what a picture means to me is special to me. I also want my work to stand away from the snapshots of a billion phones that pervade our modern hyper-visual life and I do that with the extensive post-capture editing I do.

The truth of both photography and poetry is that while they are each capable of portraying a journalistically precise representation of the facts, their value as art is in their capacity to portray the mystery and wonder of our own experience.

Jonathan Pazer 
Mendocino, California
Aug. 2022

Visit The Gallery

Mendocino Coast Photographers Gallery, Fort Bragg, CA. Photography by Jonathan Pazer and three other local photographers.

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