DVAA Member since 2015

Mark Conti

Website:

https://markcontiphoto.com

About:

Satisfaction is fleeting. Contentment does not come easily. I am a middle aged businessman who has striven to achieve both and more through my art, photography, which I have embraced and cherished like air for over 45 years. My membership at DVAA helps to nurture and nourish this art , and by extension, me!

Artist Statement:

“My photography from the early 1970’s through the mid 2000’s was produced using traditional black and white film, with all developing and printing done personally in a traditional darkroom. This experience informed my current use of digital imaging technologies, as I bring traditional techniques to the digital exposure and printing processes, relating directly to older mediums and materials. My belief is that the technical aspect of photography is one of the primary components of the overall vision of the artist. Personally controlling the process enhances my vision by providing feedback to the concept stage of the work and by serving as a means of closure to the working method.

I am concerned with and focused on the forms and content before me. Unlike mediums such as painting, where composition grows stroke by stroke in an additive way, photography is an organizational activity driven by the selection process. As there are no images without light, I react to illumination as a primary definer of form. My goal is to organize these forms and gather light in a way that allows the final image to become its own reality and, as much as possible, serve as its own source of light.

Subject wise, my work is varied, and I am equally drawn to natural and man-made subjects, often finding recurring forms in disparate images. These shared forms in various images suggest series-based imagery that grows from common connections that come to inform one another and are often an unexpected discovery on my part. The art, then, is ahead of the artist, enlightening and contributing to further to growth. Selection and organization in the camera and subsequent interpretation by the materials creates images that I hope invites the viewer to reexamine what is before them as if seeing it for the first time, every time.”