Within our recent past, the photograph has epitomized reality and defined beauty. Revered as a kind of Holy Grail, the photograph was a visual truth, showing us worlds seen, and unseen, by our eyes.

As much as this photographic philosophy seems to be the antithesis of the split second, captured moment, it is no less “decisive” in showing us the proverbial photographic “truth.”  We, Photographers, live in a world of dualities.

Photography, as with the other great arts, has always moved in great arcs of thought. It has reflected the asymmetry of the artist's psyche as it searches and shifts from the bright exterior world that is, to the darker interior that might be, morphing back toward a world less bright, even murky, a combination of the two.

With the coming of the digital age, the veracity of the image photographic has come under siege. Powerful tools in the hands of imaginative artists meld and shift our world to fit their own image. We live in the age of dynamic manipulation and “image spin,” in a world of pure imagination, limited only by the artist's vision.

This book shows the increasing range of the modern photographer: the usage of light and of shadow—the non light; the relativity of time's passage; the contrast of vibrant color and muted dramatic monotone; and, finally, the passage from photographic photo-chemical truth of “that which is” to the interior Photoshop world of “whatever may be.”

Glenn Steiner
January, 2007