Thursday, October 13, 2011

John Dugdale's Blue Period



When John Dugdale began losing his sight, he says, he learned to truly see.
“My eyes are merely instruments. The most splendid secrets of visions dwell within my mind and heart.”






Dugdale is a nearly blind photographer; he wants to preserve the craftsmanship of traditional photography and is founding the John Dugdale School of 19th Century Photography and Aesthetics. The school will open in the Mid-Hudson Valley in New York, he hopes, before he turns 50 in June.





Dugdale began losing his sight abut 18 years ago from an HIV-related stroke. When people ask how a nearly blind man can take beautiful photographs, he said he tells them, “imagery comes from inside you.
“Every time you read something, or hear something, it creates something inside your mind,” he said. “If you close your eyes and picture a rose, that image is coming directly from within you.”










When his sight declined, he began to reinvent himself from a commercial photographer into an art photographer.





“As my eyesight began to leave my body, I felt as if my spirit was leaving my body,” he said. “I felt invisible. Since I couldn’t see people, I felt as if they couldn’t see me.”



That inspired him to create photographs such as Empire Chair in the Gloaming, which gives a sense of someone present by placing a chair in a room.
An assistant helps Dugdale compose his photographs using a 19th century, large-format camera. His printing techniques, cyanotype and platinum, date to the mid-1800s.





Dugdale’s cyanotypes are simple and rich. The brilliant blue evokes a heavenly, tranquil feeling. The picture frames are handmade using imperfect antique picture glass.



“Dugdales’s work is timeless,” gallery owner Holden Luntz said. “When you look at his work, you don’t know if it was done 100 years ago or if it was done yesterday.”




Dugdale’s photography has been internationally exhibited and widely collected, including in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He recently shot the advertising photographs for the Broadway production The Miracle Worker in New York. He also has been invited to teach next year as a resident instructor at Dreyfoos School of the Arts in West Palm Beach.