Joseph Podlesnik Poster | Eldina Siljkovic 2016

Joseph Podlesnik Poster © Eldina Siljkovic (2016)

Above Poster by Eldina Siljkovic, 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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Morse Peckham, Man's Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior and the Arts. New York: Chilton Books, 1965—

Our lives are bathed in a continuous flow of signs which we interpret to catch the world in an ever-shifting network of categories. The condition of human life is continuous categorical metamorphosis. We are forever engaged in constructing around us an architecture of categories as fluid and yielding to our interests as the air. There is nothing man has not sacrificed, including millions of his fellow human beings, in the vain effort to fix that architecture, to stabilize his categories. But all knowledge, all science, all learning, all history, all thought are unstable, cannot be made static, even by the majesty of the law armed with the power of brute force.

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