This week we are sharing work submitted to Lenscratch…

Continuing the submissions today, we feature the playful images of Alexander Harding.  All photographers consider the use of light, but Alexander’s work explores it as a subject.  He manipulates light directly from the sun, refracting it in a way that celebrates its beauty as a naturally occurring phenomenon.  The luminous forms become a collective for all the moments where light seemed to dance across the walls, or even vibrate into existence.

Alexander Harding was born in 1980 in Boston, Massachusetts. He received his BFA in Painting from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2002. In 2003 he completed an additional year as a special student in Photography. In 2011 Harding received His MFA in Photography from MassArt. Using Photography and other media, Harding’s work explores our physical and emotional connections to sunlight.

He has been in numerous Exhibitions including Photographic Resource Center’s 15th Annual Exhibition, The 2010 and 2011 Boston Young Contemporaries Exhibitions. This past fall, the first survey of his work, was shown at Panopticon Gallery in Boston, MA.

Since 2007, Harding has been an Adjunct Professor in fine arts at the Boston Architectural College. He lives and works in Wallingford, Connecticut.

 Visible Light

In my work, I am concerned with light, more specifically light from the sun. The sun, being the center of our universe is the source for all that lives on our planet. It keeps us in a specific orbit, and its waves provide us with energy allowing us to thrive. Whether it is acknowledged or not, we all have a strong relationship with the sun. Its light enables our visual perception and at times, shapes our emotions. Although the sun affects how we feel, its light remains mysterious and ephemeral. We can feel it on our skin and in our eyes, but it seems intangible to us. We cannot hold or preserve it.

Through my work I explore the sun’s physical presence and quantitative character, attempting to give sunlight an environment to travel within and record its behaviors. I primarily use photography to make my work as its apparatus promotes a very critical and literal type of visual perception and it is processes are controlled by light itself.

The word “Photography” most closely translates to “writing or drawing in light”. I think of my photographs in this way; not as only a visual record of a moment in time but as images created by light. Events in light are unique, organic and fleeting. This being the case, I do not attempt to reproduce these events. I can only shape the environment the sun enters and the amount of light that strikes the film within a period of time.

What I hope viewers attain from my work is a sense of the marvel that light is. Through my work I wish to remain grateful to light, which enables our ability to see, reminding us that perception itself is a gift.