Artist's Statement

Artist's Statement

'Beauty' is an attribute we ascribe to things that cause in us a particular reaction, which philosophers call the 'aesthetic experience'. The experience may be occasioned by situations as diverse as watching a sunset, listening to music, watching a play, listening to a bird sing, playing music or making a photograph. In fact, it can be engendered by absolutely any situation.

When I was in college, a fellow student commented once that she sought to make her entire life a dance. At the time I, a philosophy major, could have argued the impossibility of that goal. Now, decades later, however, I share her ambition. I've become an 'aesthetic experience junkie'.

I am inexorably drawn to activities that may provide aesthetic experiences. Activities that occupy large parts of my life include playing music (ranging from traditional West African drum rhythms to European renaissance court music), writing computer programs, riding bicycles (on the road) and making photographs. All of these activities are, for me, portals to aesthetic experience.

While music provides my most intense aesthetic experiences, they are also the most fleeting. Photography, a medium I've practiced most of my life, provides extensive opportunities to experience the aesthetic. It is a multi-faceted art form, each side of which has aesthetic potential.

Initially exposing the image is a dance with the subject of the photograph, whether animate or not, where the photographer refines a vision until time and space converge into what Henri Cartier-Bresson called the ‘decisive moment'. (If you’re paying attention, that's when you push the button.)

Processing the photograph provides a second avenue to the aesthetic. Whether in a darkroom or on a computer, manipulating the image is both the realization of a vision and a generation of new vision. It is time without time, when the photographer's technique, experience and imagination dance with the image to form a clear expression.

Putting photographs (or anything else, for that matter) together into a show offers yet another access to aesthetic experience. Each image engages in a dance with those around it, forming an expression greater than the single images. In hanging the show, one dances with the images to achieve that greater expression.

Finally, looking at the show offers aesthetic opportunity for an audience, offering someone else a turn to dance.

R.L. Geyer
December, 2002

Æsthetic Endeavors