| Previous Works / Color series 1987-88 | |||||||||||||||
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Intricate Contradictions By Jean Deval / Artention 1989 |
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| ...The colors of his photographic images are at once strikingly beautiful and yet jarringly discordant, as are the images themselves which simultaneously evoke joy, nostalgia and sadness. The creator is Daniel Lee. Daniel Lee's creations are deceptively simple. The printed images seem at first glance to be perfectly balanced in orderly symmetry. On closer inspection, however, a tension becomes apparent. Something is amiss. Conventional logic is endangered. The objects are symbols - exquisitely detailed and focused but juxtaposed in such a manner as to pose the questions, "Why" and "How?" Although a sense of foreboding dominates many of the prints, one feels an urge to continue the minute examination and even to enjoy the deliciously heady experience. But the images hint at order bordering on chaos. It was through his work with one of his major cosmetic accounts, Revlon, that he made a creative breakthrough while exploring the merits of a new area of commercial photography. By manipulating the additive subtractive color formation technique, lee found he could produce bright, luminous colors and eye-catching images for large lightbox presentations in Bloomingdales, the well-known New York department store. He then began to experiment for himself. He said that at that time he was much influenced by paintings he had seen exhibited in New York galleries. "The paintings were so big and colorful, and so great with so much to say, and there was so much there from the artist. I wondered, why can't the camera do more than just documentary?" Lee felt that he needed to make his work more mere decoration. "I decided to pick something very simple to me. I started with the fruit and later added the flowers and then started sketching and experimenting with color. I sketch a lot," he explained. Lee's creative juices ran wild as he embarked on this exciting new phase in his life. In order to maintain maximum control over close-up focusing and depth of field, Lee used his large format cameras to shoot 4" x 5" and 8" x 10" transparencies. For these experiments he built a translucent platform in his studio and with colored gels and filters on the studio lights (to inhibit, accentuate or wash out colour) he shot hundreds of sheets of film to study and compare effects and produced, in his own words, "Some very weird-looking images!" By directing a spotlight up through the translucent base, Lee realized he could change the color of shadows while retaining the natural hue of the fruit. That was just the beginning. He went on to produce and original body of work quite unlike any other in the New York photographic art world. "I chose these simple things, fruits and flowers, because they are around me. I have always had to go far away to find something to photograph and that bothers me because I don't have enough time to continue further. But flowers are very hard to photograph. It's so easy for them to become very sweet; but I wouldn't be satisfied with that. I don't think these are sweet," Lee said, as he displayed a handful of transparencies composed of blossoms and fruit of colors just a mite harsher than those of nature. The brightly lit, heavily shadowed images throbbed with symbolism to tantalize the viewer... |
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| "Autumn in August" 1987, 24"X40" Dye Transfer print | |||||||||||||||
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| (More webpages are still under construction) | |||||||||||||||
| "Late Tide" 1988, 24"X40" Dye Transfer print | |||||||||||||||
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| "Collection" 1988, 24"X40" Dye Transfer print | |||||||||||||||
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| "Memory of Sea" 1987, 24"X40" Dye Transfer print | |||||||||||||||
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