Kirk Decker

I use Film, Digital, and Infrared cameras in my photography. When I use Film I’m not looking for some sort of Ultimate Quality in film. I’m looking for an aesthetic quality, that incorporates the Japanese ideas of mono no aware, wabi, and y_gen. I embrace film now, for the very qualities that when we shot film (back then) were considered qualities to be avoided.
Shooting with Film is about the realization that perfection is not beauty and that it is our ÒflawsÓ that make us beautiful; realizing that our censoring has been self-censoring, all our restraints and hesitations have been self imposed based on our misconceptions of what we see in ourselves. It is about being beautiful in the moment now, never waiting to be beautiful later.

The Digital cameras that I use excel at recording the surface of things, a personÕs face for a passport, a flower for a catalog, the facade of a building. While these cameras can easily make a perfect surface image, these images frequently add up to something that is less than the object portrayed.
The best photography is not a literal description of a surface already seen and known. The best images are metaphors that evoke images of things unseen; love, strength, loss, struggle, change. These images that see past the surface of the thing — person, flower, building — are the images I want to create.

Infrared is a spectrum of light that is below the range of light that the human eye can see. In a sense, IÕm making images with invisible light. Photographing in infrared, making images with unseen light is a way for me to explore the idea that ÒOne should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.Ó In all the mediums that I use, IÕm looking for a complex deeper beauty that’s frequently hidden until light & shadow, place & time, and, fleeting expression suddenly, unexpectedly come together for a few moments to be a muse pointing towards that beauty.