Magic & Logic: Robert Langham III

“A statement attributed to Ansel Adams is: ‘You don’t take a photograph, you make it’. Robert Langham has embraced that concept and taken his art one step further.” -Geoffrey Koslov, New Visions-Part 1: Still Life Photography, May 22, 2018

Robert Langham’s kinetic still life, logic defying, photographs are made with a magician’s slight-of-hand and the skill of a master-of-the-darkroom. Spending time with Robert Langham’s not-so-still life photographs, you will be surprised to discover that they are made using traditional film, low tech hands on tricks and dark room processes without the use of digital media or computer editing. Langham defines his kinetic still lifes as images of an event more than an arrangement. His active still life images capture a carefully orchestrated, fleeting, stop-action moment that becomes visible only when multiple exposures reveal what the film has recorded.  The subjects of this labor intensive, analog process also bring together unrelated objects that also will keep you guessing. And as if by sleight of hand, the odd collection of objects burns, melts, blooms, twists, tilts, sways and balances precariously before the camera. Unlike digital photographs, the images remain a mystery until the film is developed.  Langham admits, “The subjects come from my yard, the storeroom, the garbage, street, flowerbeds and lawns of my neighbors, the street, and the trash…the local ecosystem.  In the studio, the objects are arranged and are then photographed on a tiny board stage.”