Avery Danziger
Artist’s Statement

This summer I saw a wonderful exhibition at the Kemper Museum in KC entitled “Deceleration” and the show both moved and inspired me deeply. I was especially taken with the work of Rei Naito who introduced me to the Japanese concept of “hakanasa”.
Hakanasa “privileges small, fragile, and fleeting things;
because they are soon to disappear, they are to be enjoyed to the fullest while they exist.”

These nighttime shots at the beach in Spain and the moonlit nudes, both taken in last few months, reflect my assimilation of this concept.

As with all my prior work, there are no double exposures or Photoshop trickery with my images. These newest works were all made at night, using very long time exposures, hand held, with only moonlight and a small hand held flashlight for illumination. I “stroked” the parts of the image with the flashlight that I wanted to freeze (the nude model or the crests of the waves) while letting the background blur. The exposures were long enough to allow me to stroke multiple waves in the case of the sea images, or have the model move around in the frame. In both cases, the resulting images are constructed within the single exposure.