Hendrik Paul — DARK LIGHT – PhotoBook Journal

Review by Lee Halvorsen •

This book is more experience than observation, more emotion than entertainment, more subtle and captivating than literal and descriptive. The volume is finely made, medium weight…two hundred twenty-seven fascinating pages filled with meditative styled images not typically brought together in such an immersive volume. And, immersive it is…slowly wrapping itself around the reader and bringing one into the experience.

I was slow to accept that experience, was reluctant to go beyond the literal in the images, at first glance I wondered if this was astrophotography. Then I reread Paul’s description of his journey:
“…quiet record of that liminal space, where grief and grace nearly touch and where the visible world mirrors something far less tangible.” With just a few more pages I was fully engaged and would describe the effect as existential, subliminal…this was more than images, more than abstract.

During an apparently difficult time in his life, Paul discovered a vantage point on a cliff above the crashing ocean. Using his camera as both a shield and a guide during long night hours in this place, he made abstract images of shadow and light, images of waves, rocks, still waters, ocean spray, horizons, glistening shores, and more. They are gentle images of light and dark, edge and abyss, emotion and acceptance. He posits this quiet nighttime solitude next to the changing waters and skies invited a different way of listening, a different way of seeing and the images he made represent the emotion of personal discovery.

When I began paying attention to the edges, the tones, the glimmering light, the reflections in the abstracts, these secondary elements became the stars of the images, not the abstracts themselves. How long did the ocean spray survive? Did Paul appreciate the drops of the spray as he’d snapped the shutter? The stillness just moments later? I think he probably did; his images captured emotion, to use his words, the combination of solitude and the process of turning the personal turmoil into transcendence as meditative and positive.

And curiously, in this book of black and white abstracts, the uplifting reflective nature of Paul’s experience survives…glimpses into more than the literal. The nighttime images capture not only the water, sky and land, but also the mood, the sounds, the environment. The sequencing of images is well thought out, as if I were sitting in the same spot Paul had been sitting. Flashing waves to still waters, to rocky shorelines, to distant horizons all gently bringing the reader to a point of ease, where introspect is possible with the calm of Paul’s eye brought to the page.

If you’d like a calming, introspective, meditative book, with soothing abstract images, this book is the one for you. In his Artist Book Statement Paul says, “It was a calm that whispered cosmic secrets, a stillness that beckoned me to close my eyes and listen with the subtlest parts of my soul.” Amen.

_____

Lee Halvorsen is assistant editor, writer and visual artist.

_____

Hendrik Paul, DARK LIGHT

Artist: Hendrik Paul, currently working and living in Mill Valley, CA

Afterword: Star Songs, Traditional Cherokee Song, and Text by Hendrik Paul

Publisher: Datz Press, Seoul, Korea.

Printed by Munsung Printing

Book design, Younghea Kim

Concept & Sequencing: Sangyon Joo

Language: English & Korean

Hardcover, 227 pages (unnumbered), French Fold Softcover, Tritone UV printing, B&W images from film, 20×27 cm, ISBN 978-89-97605-87-3

_____

_____

Articles and photographs published in the PhotoBook Journal may not be reproduced without the permission of the PhotoBook Journal staff and the photographer(s). All images, texts, and designs are copyright of the authors and publishers.