Fragmented Lights: Expanding on the Fragmented Series

Four new photographic works are now on display as part of the Click Photography Show at Capital Arts, running from July 31 through September 13, 2025. These images extend the conceptual and visual language of my Fragmented painting series, translating its themes of emotional isolation, identity loss, and symbolic domesticity into the medium of photography.

Rather than photographing people, I turned to 1/4-inch scale (1:48) dollhouse furniture, using miniature chairs, phones, books, tables, and other familiar household forms to build intimate still life scenes. These are not simple nostalgic tableaus; they are quiet, symbolic disruptions. Using handmade aperture masks based on the silhouette figures from my paintings, I manipulated light itself to fragment the backgrounds of these images. The results are patterns of shaped bokeh, light particles rendered not as soft circles, but as ghostlike human forms watching from the edge of the scene.

On the Technical Process

Each photo was taken using a Pentax K3 Mark III DSLR with a 55mm prime lens, not a macro lens. Lighting was provided by a ring light mounted to a mini tripod with bendable legs, which proved ideal for staging complex compositions in unusual and constrained locations. I created custom aperture masks, meticulously cut by hand with a minuscule blade, and attached them to the lens. These masks forced incoming light to conform to the silhouettes, shaping the out-of-focus elements into fragmented echoes of human presence.

Depth of field and focal plane were critical. One key lesson from my initial attempt (the evidence of which has been thankfully deleted!) was that the still life sets I first constructed were too large to allow for the selective focus necessary to capture bokeh-shaped light properly. Without sufficient foreground/background separation, the silhouettes never appeared. I also learned that scouting locations without a solid plan, especially in the dark, was less romantic than it sounded...bug bites, sweat, and the wrong shoes do not help creativity flourish!

The second night, I worked more deliberately: building smaller, tighter scenes and selecting locations based on background light sources that would play well with the aperture masks. I shot these at dusk and night in overlooked or transitional spaces: fairgrounds, alleys, light posts, loading docks, the back edges of parking lots...all locations that felt emotionally peripheral, yet charged.

On Content and Meaning

This series focuses on:

• Emotional displacement through space: The objects appear anchored, but the atmosphere around them is transient and unstable, just like memory.

• The symbolic emptiness of domestic artifacts: These familiar forms, a rotary phone, a candy jar, an empty dining table, speak not of use, but of abandonment.

• Memory fragments appearing like ghosts: The silhouetted figures in the background aren't literal people; they are memories, watchers, selves undone.

Each image is a staged story, created with precision, patience, and a little absurdity: An artist laying, crawling/crouching on asphalt with a miniature lamp in one hand and a camera in the other! In this world, the mundane becomes sacred, and tiny relics reflect enormous absence.

Location Notes

Disconnected: Captured at the Sullivan Fair Grounds livestock building, with lights draped over a gate and the miniature phone resting on a wooden post.

Quiet Rebellion: Shot outside Cracker Barrel, using their porch lights. I lay in the furthest parking space while the staff ignored me completely.

Bittersweet Seat: Taken between Walmart and Taco Bell, where a solitary chair with a candy jar faced traffic and streetlight bokeh.

Echoes of Pewter and Paper: Staged on a worn green electrical box near Flying J truck stop. A turkey feather at the scene became an unplanned poetic detail, a hint at a forgotten feast now reduced to pewter silence and an outdated calendar.

On View

These four photographs are now exhibited at:

Capital Arts in Jefferson City, Missouri, as part of the Click Photography Show (July 31 – Sept 13, 2025).

Reception: Thursday, August 7, 5–7 PM

Details at: www.capitalarts.org

Facebook event: Click Photography Show

Looking Ahead

This series will continue. I plan to develop twelve final images, experimenting with themes like:

• Time and erosion (using a collection of miniature clocks)

• Absence at the table (empty pewter dishware)

• Fragmented routines (a toothbrush and cup on a lone bathroom sink)

• A memory hallway (framed photos on a wall leading to a glow of light)

• I am open to suggestions!

Limited Editions

Each image in the 12x12 and 11x14 formats will be released in a limited edition of 25. Interested collectors can purchase 1/25 at Capital Arts Gallery. 25%of all sales stay with Capital Arts to help them promote the arts in the community. Smaller prints may be available in larger editions, while future larger-format prints (16x20 or larger) may be capped at 3–5 editions to preserve rarity.

About the Images

"Disconnected"

Location: Sullivan Fair Grounds livestock building

Subject: A solitary blue rotary phone on a white cabinet, staged in front of a string of lights.

Statement: This image reflects the ache of disconnection in a hyperconnected world. The blue rotary phone, once a lifeline for reaching out, now sits unused and forgotten, a relic of intimacy gone quiet. The streaks of bokeh light behind it echo the presence of unseen voices and stories left unheard. As in the Fragmented paintings, the subject exists in isolation, surrounded by space and memory. Here, the ghost is not a figure, but the absence of one, a call never made, a connection never returned.

Quiet Rebellion

Location: Cracker Barrel parking lot, under porch lights

Subject: A pink chaise lounge with a single book and a tiny toy pistol atop it; a pink side table with a matching pink lamp.

Statement: At first glance, this scene is nostalgic, cozy, quaint, almost childlike. But the toy gun on the book disrupts the comfort. It suggests protest, tension, an assertion of presence within a space that assumes passivity. Like the silhouettes in Fragmented, the feminine-coded objects are not mere decoration, they carry weight. The image asks: what happens when rebellion must be staged quietly, with a smile, in a pink room? Who notices? And who dares to look closer?

Bittersweet Seat

Location: Base of a light post between Walmart and Taco Bell, near stoplights

Subject: A single white chair with a glass jar filled with colorful candy beads.

Statement: A child’s offering or an adult’s memory, this chair holds the sweetness of something long gone. The jar is full, yet untouched. The chair is upright, yet empty. It’s a place set for someone who never returned. In the glow of traffic and anonymity, this image crystallizes the essence of Fragmented: the tension between presence and absence, fullness and longing. It is the image of waiting without knowing if anyone will come.

Echoes of Pewter and Paper

Location: Worn green electrical box down the road from Flying J

Subject: A modest dining table and chairs with an empty pewter pitcher and a tiny calendar.

Statement: Time passes, but its traces remain. This dining scene, stripped of food, of people, of sound, becomes a quiet monument to gatherings that once were. The tarnished pitcher and outdated calendar mark the fading relevance of the scene, while the lights behind suggest lives continuing without us. The image resonates with Fragmented through its depiction of domestic space as haunted: not by ghosts, but by the meaning we project into emptiness.