Joseph Podesnik Poster | Lauren Garnes 2016

Joseph Podlesnik Poster © Lauren Garnes (2016) •

Above Poster by Lauren Garnes, graphic design student, Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa, in celebration of the photographs of Joseph Podlesnik. An artist, photographer, and filmmaker (BFA University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, MFA Cornell University), he is associate professor and lead faculty for foundations at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. In 2016, he received the Inez Hall Outstanding Faculty Award. He lives in Phoenix AZ.

Podlesnik's photographs (reproduced with his permission from Almost Seeing) are of particular interest because (despite appearances) they were not constructed in Adobe Photoshop by sandwiching multiple layers. Nor are they double exposures. They are simply single frame, through the lens camera shots, by which he makes astonishing use of light, shadow and reflections.

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Leonard Woolf [British writer, husband of Virginia Woolf] in Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880 to 1904. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960, p. 151—

And [British philosopher] Bertrand Russell has described the pleasure with which one used to watch philosopher [G.E.] Moore trying unsuccessfully to light his pipe when he was arguing an important point. He would light a match, hold it over the bowl of his pipe until it burnt his fingers and he had to throw it away, and go on doing this—talking the whole time or listening intently to the other man's argument—until the whole box of matches was exhausted.

• Photograph used in poster copyright © Joseph Podlesnik. All rights reserved.