To Emanate The Truth

Emanations is a series of photographs in my book that were a unique adventure all their own. I knew for some time that I wanted to do a photographic exploration of the cabbalistic tree of life but had been struggling with how I was going to go about it in a way that was both meaningful and exploratory. The tree of life is not something that I work with which played a large part in my wanting to do the series, I wanted to tackle something with fresh eyes, to not just repeat much of what had been done before.

Cropped detail from ‘Geburah’ - this crop approx 1mm size.

Revelation arrived whilst I was experimenting with a new technique of light focusing that I had been trying to create and in that moment the first emanation presented itself to me, and so the work began. For context, most images in the series are no more than around 5-7mm in size and were made with exposures of between 10 and 30 seconds in length.

I tried to limit the information that I was exposed to regarding each sphere, I wanted to get a very bare bones idea of what each entailed and then see what presented itself. After I had finally captured the image I would then check what I had shot against more information to make sure I was happy with the end result. There were no reshoots taken.

When I first started to show people these images I would receive a lot of questions on how I had achieved that look, what methods had I used in photoshop to create that effect and it was important to me that people realised the images had not been photoshopped or manipulated. To think this took away from the truth of what they were, emanations all their own captured in a fractionally small moment of light refraction. The only adjustments made to the images was to clean up a little noise from the very long exposure and to adjust any slight over-exposures - everything else was captured in camera.

The images were exciting to work on as a seemingly whole other world was presenting itself, one with its own very small but ineffably loud voice saying ‘I am here’, it just took a particular method to ‘see’.