"I once was lost, but now I'm found."

Before I shifted my career into web design and photography, I spent many years managing a busy commercial art studio that made custom art installations - things like large-scale hand-painted murals and lobby-filling sculpture installations. Working on these art projects taught me a lot about creative work under the commercial pressures of tight budgets and fast deadlines, and it also just taught me a lot about making artworks that connect with people.

An idea I still think about from those days came from one of our best clients, architect David Rockwell, who designed many highly theatrical restaurants and hospitality spaces around the world.  He would often ask us to return to the idea of the ‘lost and found’ in the art installations, we made for him. If we were hand-painting a decorative pattern on the wall, he wanted parts of it, in almost random ways, to be distressed or fade away entirely. If we were making a sculpture for a large interior space like a hotel lobby, he wanted it to emerge and swoop in and out of the interior depending on where you stood in the space. If we were making a mural for a restaurant, he wanted parts of it to appear as if the mural continued behind the banquets where no one could see it, or have us make the mural out of glass beads that would shimmer and break the surface when disturbed by air currents or different lighting. What was this idea about?  Why did it appeal so much to David Rockwell, and why has it stuck with me after so many years?

Lost and found is a concept that does seem to reflect an eternal and deep aspect of existence. When we walk through a forest, light from a sunny day will appear and disappear in dappled patterns as breezes blow through the forest canopy. Greenery and color appear in the spring, fade away by autumn, largely disappear in the winter and return the following spring. Clouds in the sky form, grow, dissipate, and form again. Emotions, like clouds, form and take over our minds for minutes or hours or milliseconds before submerging into our subconsciousness like bubbles appearing and disappearing on the surface of a boiling pot. Relationships we have with family and friends take dramatically different forms and appearances over the years.

So lost and found can be a way of understanding existence as one of continuous change.  Everything we are and know is transient, evanescent, and subject to observable change given a long enough time frame. 

I think the idea has really stuck with me as a photographer making pictures in the world because I am continually seeking to spot and hold moments that emerge and disappear in fractions of a second. Every day I walk the streets with my camera I see the truth of our lost and found world where mystery and beauty and humor and ugliness reveal themselves in flashes and just as quickly hide again. If my photograph is successful, I hold some proof, some evidence that the world, which can feel so commonplace so much of the time, is as alive and magical a place as I believe it to be. 

From an aesthetic and formal standpoint, the idea of the lost and found also holds power. A photograph that describes a scene where the subject is smack in the center and in perfect focus does half the job a photograph ought to do (a photographic challenge I wrestle with all the time). A photo like that answers some questions about the world. It tells us that such and such looked like this at a certain time on a certain day and that we think this subject is important for whatever reason.  It tells us what the photographer found. It is good to get those answers right. But the other half of the job a photograph ought to do is to raise some questions. Some of the questions you might want to raise are about the world beyond the frame, the world inside the frame, what we are seeing, and on and on.

A photograph that is somehow able to conjure what is lost, as well as what was found, invites viewers to stay longer and to engage longer with what you have made. Those are the photos that I think hold the most power. So much more to say about this idea, but it’s late and I’m feeling pretty lost in the labyrinth for now.

Hopefully, I’ll find ya next week.

❤️

James Prochnik The NYC Photo Community | Issue 104 | February 18 - February 25, 2022