Photographic Impressionism

Interesting report of an interesting project — with some sample images.

For the French Impressionists, pink haystacks and cloud-like water lilies captured how the world appears to us — not as a sharply focused technical diagram but a montage of reflections, refractions, lights, colors and movements, often at the periphery of our vision.

Ken Holden uses photography to pursue that alternative realty on the edge of conscious awareness, synthesizing impressionism into a conceptual vision. Over the course of three years and 80,000 images, Ken has been taking photographs in San Francisco’s De Young Museum, yielding two distinct interpretational bodies of work: Photographic Impressionism The Unaltered State of Reality and the Photo Anagram™ Image Series (2008 – 2010)…

It’s funny how things come round. Photography’s ability to capture exact likenesses provoked a crisis in painting. Now that very exactitude has become a kind of straitjacket from which contemporary photographers struggle to escape. (I write with feeling on this matter.)