| Jack Kates III |
| Photography |
| South Carolina-based artist Jack Kates III creates dramatic photographs of the American landscape. Kates is a champion of photography's expressive powers. Not content merely to document the physical world around him, Kates' images provide spiritual insight. Beyond the subject matter of his photographs, his formal composition of shapes, lines and tones convey emotional and psychological meaning. Like Alfred Stieglitz's famous cloud photographs, Kates' landscape series strives for what Steiglitz called the "metaphorical power of the photograph." Exploring landscape imagery's relationship to emotional states, the dark skies, low-hanging clouds and sparseness of flora and fauna in Kates' landscape series symbolize the chaos of contemporary life. Yet somewhere in the nameless horizon is a clarity, attainable only by inner reflection. Kates' highly detailed photographs reveal, ultimately, a certain tranquility. Kates began his artistic journey during his early childhood. He demonstrated a talent for two- dimensional composition, and focused his energies in drawing. The interest in photography developed in adulthood, and led him to explore the medium through portraiture, nudes, still lifes, and certainly landscape. In his landscape photography, Kates utilizes an aerial perspective most often associated with painting. In this manner, his images become more abstract: the viewpoint of the photographs is not commonly available to an individual. Additionally, the lack of human presence within the photographs is a distancing device enabling the viewer to freely associate on a more psychological level. There is no grand narrative to hinder the relationship between the image and the viewer. With photography such an ubiquitous part of contemporary life, it is refreshing to experience an unmediated image; Kates' landscapes are as close to this as may be imagined. Kates steadfastly works only in black and white photography and has developed a master printer's technique in the manner of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Kates makes limited editions of these photographs, utilizing Giclée, an archival, high-resolution digital printing method. The prints are intimately scaled; while the subject matter may be vast, the size of the prints reveals the artist's poetic restraint. |
| From : ArtisSpectrum Magazine, Volume 13, Page 17, 2004. |
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