Michael Lujan
Artist | Hobbyist | Photography

United States

A Little Bit About Me

I first began seeing photography as a viable medium for my own art in 2004, when I bought a small 3.2 megapixel Canon Powershot A70 on a lark (yes, I have since upgraded!). At that time I was living on a cattle ranch in west Tennessee, about 40 minutes northeast of Memphis. At that time I was also saturating myself with the cinematic imagery of Andrei Tarkovsky, particularly his masterpiece Stalker; and both the wide-open spaces of Tennessee and the reverence for nature found in Tarkovsky’s work left an indelible impression on me.

I try to use my lens to leverage the alien out from under the familiar. I may spend hours over the same patch of decaying asphalt documenting the weeds growing up through the cracks, so that hopefully the viewer can come away with an impression of worlds previously unknown, though he or she may have passed by that same decaying asphalt thousands of times without a second glance.

When I collaborate with a model, of course, it’s quite different, as I am documenting the literal image of God. And if, as Blake tells us, everything appears as infinite when the doors of perception are cleansed, how much a greater expanse of infinity might be glimpsed through a being bearing the signature of the Divine?

Though all of my work begins with light captured by a light-sensitive surface, sometimes the work takes leave of its origins—the stamp of time and place—as with the kaleidoscopic digital photo-constructions (“broken symmetries“) sometimes populating these pages. But whether this lavish amount of post-processing takes place, or none at all does, hopefully something of the forms of the created world around us is still made manifest, and rendered more or less transparent to the uncreated Light of the Creator of all.

“The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.”

~ Matthew 6:22

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