Structure:
Summary:
Structure is an on going project about process and visual data acquisition, the photographs being the result of how I visually filter and process the information of the world around me.
Statement:
Walls As Experience
I am a recorder of reflected light.
Too often photography is defined in social terms, taking the interests, intentions, and/or needs of the viewer into account, and relying on external context or history for meaning. My photographs don’t function within this paradigm. They are about line, shape, form, color, surface, and light. I look at the world and think in terms of beauty and order as primal forces. Those forces define every decision I make when creating an image. Each wall begins as a canvas, a two-dimensional surface, a foundation on which to build an image.
I don’t see myself as a traditional photographer, but as an image builder, trying to capture an essence, which results in images that translate as pleasurable experiences to viewers, pleasurable because it is, not because of what it is, where it is or why it is. My photographs exist within themselves, detailed portraits of the crossroads where art and technology meet.
As art, my photography offers the viewer a Zen-like experience, where order is beauty, beauty is order, and everything necessary to comprehend a given image is contained within the image.
John A. Chakeres received his Bachelor of Fine Art degree from Ohio University in 1977 in both photography and printmaking. He has published three books of his photographs, Traces: An Investigation in Reason, 1977, D’art Objects: A Collaboration. 1978, and Random New York: An Unscripted Walk, 2008. Chakeres’s current photographs explore the concepts of formalism and found objects in context of photography. His photographs have been included in numinous exhibitions and publications. They can also be found in a number of permanent collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Southeast Museum of Photography, Monterey Museum of Art, and Tweed Museum of Art. He has also taught photography, printmaking, and digital imaging at Ohio University, Columbus College of Art and Design, and Columbus State Community College.
