This week’s photography feature explores the unique exposures captured by the rising experimental photographer Christy Lee Rogers. The Sony World Open Award Winner recently unveiled her latest collection, Luminescence, which comprises Baroque-style photographs created by submerging clothed models in dramatic lighting.
Hailing from Honolulu, Hawaii, Rogers is a visual artist specialising in underwater photography and videos, known for using Chiaroscuro lighting in much of her work. The other-worldly, intensely dramatic and colourful images she creates, as seen below, are often compared to paintings by Baroque artists such as Caravaggio or Rubens.
In 2019, Rogers won the coveted ‘Open Photographer of the Year’ award at the Sony World Photography Awards. She is also a two-time finalist in the Contemporary Talents Award, which is issued annually by the Foundation François Schneider in France. Rogers was also recently commissioned by Apple to use the powerful iPhone 11Pro’s cameras to create some underwater art.
Rogers uses multiple layers of light and dark water in her preferred medium to create the characteristically abstract and miraged effect reminiscent of classical paintings. Over the past decade, this method has been employed to create various images, some of which you might recognise from album covers, most notably that for Orchesography, the 2019 album of English new wave band Wang Chung. Elsewhere in the musical world, some of Rogers’ work was selected for display at the 2013–14 performance season of the Angers-Nantes Opera in France.
As a recent press release notes, Luminescence is the ability of certain objects to generate light through the excited state of its atoms when exposed to frequencies like ultraviolet light. Rogers uses this phenomenon as a metaphor for our own ability to focus on positive energy to bring optimism and colour to our surroundings.
This latest series – seen below – uses pitch-black pools with models illuminated by high-powered underwater spotlights for optimal contrast. The importance of such a contrast was prominently outlined in Aldous Huxley’s Heaven and Hell, an essay supplementary to The Doors of Perception.
“Light and colour tend to take on a preternatural quality when seen in the midst of environing darkness,” Huxley noted. “Fra Angelico’s ‘Crucifixion’ at the Louvre has a black background. So have the frescoes of the Passion painted by Andrea del Castagno for the nuns of Sant’ Appollonia at Florence. Hence the visionary intensity, the strange transporting power of these extraordinary works”.
Adding: “In an entirely different artistic and psychological context, the same device was often used by Goya in his etchings. Those flying men, that horse on the tightrope, the huge and ghastly incarnation of Fear – all of them stand out, as though floodlit, against a background of impenetrable night.”
Below, we present some images from Christy Lee Rogers’ Luminescence. More of her magnificent work can be seen on her website, and you can follow her on Instagram here.
