Being Here, Now: The Photographic Impressionism of Ken Holden

What are we seeing?

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).

Both series use photography in a new context, transforming the innate precision and journalistic detail of the medium into abstracted images that cause the viewer to ask: What is it I am looking at? Contrast and color, movement and transitional forms that usually escape focus draw the viewer into the space between that which is seen and yet not seen. Ken says that his work represents his attempts to capture an alternative reality around us at every moment, hidden in plain sight by our information-driven focus. These liminal images confront the viewer with questions of how our own mental context alters the way we experience the world.

The unaltered abstraction of the work also creates a dialog about the medium itself. Viewers carry certain assumptions with them when they look at photographs, paintings, sculptures or other media. While Ken uses only the most essential photographic toolkit — long focal length lens, mid-to small aperture settings, slow speeds and tight compositions — his images are often stripped of the conventional representational references viewers have come to expect from photography. The differences between painting and photography are abridged or dissolved altogether, freeing viewers to transcend the boundaries of the medium and enjoy the image in its own right.

The Photo Anagram Image Series furthers this investigation via impressionistic abstraction. Using a simple replication and mirroring process he developed, an original, unaltered image evolves to become a construct into which people can read anything, depending on their own assumptions and experience. From the abstraction, colors and shapes begin to emerge, patterns that exist in nature but which we see only through the replication process.

Ken explains that his process, along with own life experiences as a combat veteran, has allowed him to live in the moment. In 1968, as a U.S. Marine infantryman, he stepped on a booby-trap in Vietnam that blew his leg off after a lengthy combat firefight.

"I vividly remember each and everyday is the extraordinary beauty of life." he says. "As the bomb went off, I saw a brilliant flash of white light, and then heard a thunderous explosion, followed by a concussion and then there was nothingness. The entire process of going from nothingness to somethingness was exhilarating for me. This link with life and death is fixed within my psyche and influences in some way how I interpret the world around me. That vision I carry within me is ever present which merges into an emotional creative process. This emotional sensitivity is on the surface of every photograph I capture."

In the fleeting and peripheral space of unaltered reality are patterns that reward the viewer with their unexpected and fleeting beauty: fog banks shifting and disappearing, the ripple of a plastic tarp, the briefly crossed shadows of visitors. Blink and it’s gone.

"My hope is that these images provide a context to question what we see of the world and how we see it — and to better understand our relationship with the environment all around us."

See more of Ken Holden's work at his site, kenholden.com