Sam Lightman


Photographers observe; artists interpret. Today’s digital imaging technology enables the synthesis of the two into a new medium that expands the horizons of both while permanently and increasingly blurring the distinctions between them.

Where previously digital imaging techniques were applied primarily in the service of commercial messaging, the technology also opened up an infinite horizon of artistic possibilities that are only now becoming widely visible. Sam Lightman’s work attempts to explore the synergistic application of digital manipulation to photographic observation in the service of artistic expression.

Lightman’s most recent endeavours have been applied to small or even minuscule segments of natural phenomena, specifically the variations within a few centimeters of birch bark in combination with the shapes and flows of lichens found ubiquitously on the branches and trunks of our Pacific Northwest rain forest trees.

The results are a series of intriguing abstractions called Natural Attachments that challenge the preconceptions which the viewer brings to photographic imagery.

www.samlightman.com