Michael Sierchio

The Flame of Cognition

These images are "straight" digital photographs, in that they are not the product of manipulation via some digital darkroom process. Rather, the type and degree of abstraction in the images is created in the camera at the time of exposure.

The Flame of Recognition is a well known Aperture Monograph honoring the work of Edward Weston. Weston was one of the modernist photographers who reacted strongly against pictorialism, which sought to legitimize photography as a fine art, but did so by emulating the effects of painting and printmaking of the time. The modernists attempted to depict scenes as realistically as permitted by the medium, and (at least rhetorically, if not materially) renounced manipulation.

Pure photography is defined as possessing no qualities
of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any
other art form.

- The f/64 Group, ca. 1932

I chose The Flame of Cognition as homage to Weston (and Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Willard van Dyke, Brett Weston, et al.), but also as a point of departure. I hope in this body of work to present images that are challenging, interesting, moving, and even pretty, while frustrating the habit of the viewer to recognize an object represented as a photograph.