Busacca Gallery

Abandoned Restrooms - Erick, Oklahoma 2013. By Photo Artist Chris Lake. This image is from “The Borrowed Horizon,” an unfinished project examining the contemporary American landscape over a series of recent travels. Intuition, light, and serendipity provide the subject matter as I travel along the two lane highways and back roads that cut so close to the bone of America. Informed and inspired by the legendary work of artists such as Robert Frank and Walker Evans, I set out into an American photographic tradition filled with powerful and iconic images that describe various aspects of our culture and land. My intent is not to rehash or imitate that which came before but to simply do the work that makes me happy and record the America that I see, in my time. Erick is a very small town in western Oklahoma with a general store and an abandoned hardware store that sits untouched since the doors were mysteriously locked in 1967. You can still look into the oversized, dusty plate glass windows and see tools in the display cabinets. Walking the few, wide, western streets that make up Erick, you cannot help but feel as though the passage of time somehow has less influence there. I made this image on a cool February afternoon during a trip along Route 66. The abandoned restrooms were attached to a shuttered business, a restaurant or bar perhaps. The light, texture, and geometry immediately jumped out at me, and I like that something as mundane as an old restroom can assume it’s own beauty under the right conditions. Limited edition of ten prints, signed and numbered. Printed with Epson Ultrachome inks on heavyweight Moab Entrada 100% cotton rag bright 360 gsm paper. All materials are fully archival for 100+ years. Artist fingerprint on verso. Camera used is Leica M9 with Zeiss Biogon 35 f2

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Photography#Art

During the 20th century, both fine art photography and documentary photography became accepted by the English-speaking art world and the gallery system. In the United States, a handful of photographers, including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, John Szarkowski, F. Holland Day, and Edward Weston, spent their lives advocating for photography as a fine art. At first, fine art photographers tried to imitate painting styles. This movement is called Pictorialism, often using soft focus for a dreamy, 'romantic' look. In reaction to that, Weston, Ansel Adams, and others formed the Group f/64 to advocate 'straight photography', the photograph as a (sharply focused) thing in itself and not an imitation of something else.







Photography has become ubiquitous in recording events and data in science and engineering.

A new Modernist aesthetic that was based on precisely exposed images of natural forms and found objects.



The market for photographic services demonstrates the aphorism "A picture is worth a thousand words", which has an interesting basis in the history of photography.





There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless. What is this quality? What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? What quality is common to Sta. Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto's frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cezanne? Only one answer seems possible — significant form. In each, lines and colors combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions.