|
Robert Kawika Sheer was born in Anaheim, California and raised
in Honolulu, Hawaii. He fell in love with photography as a
high school freshman at Oahu's Punahou School. In 1981, he
attended Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles,
California where he studied photography and earned a Bachelor
of Communication Arts in 1985. Over the next 15 years, Sheer
acquired a masterful knowledge of photography by taking
various advanced photography classes at Santa Monica College.
On an excursion to the Mojave Desert in 1999, Sheer discovered
the "Spirit Shadow" technique that presently has his fine art
photographs hanging alongside the works of Pablo Picasso, Marc
Chagall, Henri Matisse, and Rembrandt. Sheer's pictures are
all performance-art photographs; no digital manipulation or
multiple exposures were used in their creation. They're all
taken at night with long single exposures lasting from 45
minutes up to six hours using a large-format 4x5 view camera
with 20 square-inch negatives.
Once Sheer opens the shutter of his camera, he enters the
frame of his picture (sometimes accompanied by my wife Ingela)
and becomes a performer within the scene. Because he is using
low-intensity moonlight to slowly illuminate the nighttime
scene, he is able to journey in front of the camera without
the negative being able to record his movement. In order for
you to see his presence in the form of a "Spirit Shadow",
Sheer carries a small portable strobe flash hidden in his hand
and stands facing a wall where he wants the shadowy figure to
appear. He quickly flashes the strobe light into the wall and
partially blocks the bounce of this light trying to reach back
to the camera with his body. This creates a dark silhouette
surrounded by an illuminated aura. The moonlight slowly
transforms the dark silhouette into a translucent shadowy
figure and builds up the light level of the entire scene over
the course of the lengthy exposure. Since the negative can't
see him moving around, once he creates one "Spirit Shadow",
there's nothing stopping him from creating more "Spirit
Shadows" on the same negative. As far as he knows, Sheer is
the only photographer in the world performing this style of
photography.
# # #
For more information please contact Charles Carroll at Green
Galactic 323-466-5141 or
charles@greengalactic.com. |
|
