Justus Sundermann Gallery
September 15 through October 31

“My focus is creating or reenacting moments that suggest the supernatural among us. Incredible peace and stillness have come over me even in the darkest of hours when I was left a quadriplegic by a rare spinal cord disorder. These images are an attempt to capture those events or relate the state of being that embodies them. Art is a shared experience, so at some level I hope to relate to the human condition motivated by a sense of need for the transcendent.

The majority of my photographs are composed in-camera without Photoshop. They are not photo-composites. I shoot from two to eight exposures on a single frame of 120mm film using either an 80mm lens, handmade pinhole, or a combination of both. These combinations are like meditation in that I never see the final image until the film is processed. In the meantime, I consider color, shape and form as I overlap exposures. Unlike a regular camera, you cannot look through the lens of a pinhole because it is a camera without a lens. I sometimes use masks to cover portions of the 80mm lens as I juxtapose images in relation to one another in multiple exposures. The film negative allows me to shoot at different locations on different days as I combine images, unlike a digital camera. I use this process to facilitate meditative or transcendent images that look familiar but are strange to the known or real world.” – Roger Shackelford

Read an article about Roger Shackelford at voyagedallas.com.

Event flyer here.