Installation view of video Beyond the Horizon in theater facade, SDSU Gallery, 2023
Installation view, Catherine Couturier Gallery, Houston, 2019
A ghost light is a single bulb left illuminated near center stage when a theater is unoccupied and would otherwise be completely dark. Superstition holds that a ghost light provides opportunity for the resident ghosts of the theater to perform onstage when everyone else has left for the night.
About Ghost Light Theaters
I grew-up going to the movies almost every week at the Stanford Theater in Palo Alto, CA—a restored Art Deco movie palace built in 1925. Showing only films from Hollywood’s Golden Age, I munched my popcorn and raisinets while memorizing Bogart and Bacall. This immersion in glorious black and white movies I consider my introduction to photography, and Ghost Light Theaters is an homage to that formative experience. Although I work with still photographs, my love of moving pictures influences my work—a single snapshot sets me to wondering: what’s the story? What frames came before? What happened next? For me, Ghost Light bridges the space between the decisive moment of a single photograph and the extended gaze of a movie—how can photography be both?
A theater is a lot like a camera, they are both dark spaces for holding pictures. I like to think that within both spaces, pictures take on a life of their own.
Theaters
Sequences
The imagery for Ghost Light Theaters consists of interchangeable slides printed on handmade Japanese paper and accompanied by brief narrative intertitles—stills from an imaginary silent movie. These montage sequences are composed from layers of vernacular snapshots and silhouettes of paper figures meticulously cut and photographed in the studio—ghosts.
