“After Dark” (2012)

Pittsburgh City Paper Review (2012)

“After Dark” is a collaborative digital photographic project between Colter Harper and Carolina Loyola-Garcia, that employs long-exposure “light-painting” techniques to portray nine artists who have shaped Pittsburgh’s cultural landscape: Karla Boos, Ayanah Moor, Thaddeus Mosley, James Simon, Ben Opie, Phat Mandee, Brian Brown, Adrienne Wehr, and Sarah Humphrey. These artists, whose work includes drama, music, sculpture, videography, painting, and dance, represent a sample of the city’s creative community and serve as the muses for these highly stylized images. The photographic portraits, though set in the artist’s respective workspaces, reject realism for the realm of fantasy. Each carefully composed portrait requires the orchestration of many moving lights during a series of thirty-second exposures. The resulting images explore the artist’s personalities while placing them in a world of illusions. These portraits were presented in the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s 707 Penn Ave Gallery Space from November 2012 to January 2013.

The photographic process requires the subject to undergo several hours of posing in darkness while maintaining still. For each thirty-second exposure, the artist sits, stands, or lays in a composed space while we apply a range of colored lights to the subject and space in order to expose the image. The technique requires many trial runs in order to achieve the desired exposure and depends a great deal on the chance combination of various elements of light treatment. We’ve shot largely with a Canon 5D Mark II and a 24mm 1.4 fixed focal length lens. The images are highly composed, and due to the long exposures, the camera must be placed on a tripod and the shots must be carefully framed. While “light-painting” has been widely used in photography, we believe this project stands apart in its scope as well as it artistic goals. The images should stand on their own as visual explorations of fantasy and illusion within the creative spaces of the given artists.