Chimera

C H I M E R A

C H I M E R A T H E

P H O T O G R A P H Y

O F

LMF Y A T E S

Š 2014 LMF Yates Protected under the Berne Convention.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the copyright holder, except for brief passages quoted in review.

All rights reserved.

For additional information, please contact info@omphaloskepsis.com First Edition Bound by Ephemeral Books 2014. ephemeralbooks@gmail.com

FOREWORD The photography of LMF Yates presented in this volume is poetry. She’s a poet in her ambition at least to capture a moment of essence. She’s a poet, but not of epic poems, nor even of sonnets. Her work is haiku.

These images appear to us everyday. They surround us. Yet we’re oblivious to them as we occupy ourselves with the business of what we call living. But in that life, these overlooked images, these memories and half-dreams, are worth the trouble of seeing. Yates has given us the opportunity to see the familiar as something wondrous and arresting or, as the title would tell us, chimerical.

Fifty years ago, such work would require years of effort, and this volume would be the entire oeuvre of a skilled photographer. In that earlier period, perfection of the black-and-white image as art was within reach. Color photographs of this nature, even for the most excellent of photographers, were disappointments. Visionaries in scale, in the use of contrast, in the gray and black of shadow, and in the white brightness of sun and moon, these artists applied their skills to create massive, monumental, or subtle and intimate works of black and white. But existing technology wasn’t equal to their vision in color. In this age of digital photography, Yates has taken advantage of access to tools and filters and has brought her vision to life.

Yates has captured and caged these ineffable moments; she has revealed to us what is before our eyes waiting to be discovered and wondered at. If the world is an illusion, these images are its very coinage. To see these images is to see beyond them, is to see them as allegories of the lives we live and the manner in which we live them, and the way we delude ourselves that an instant and a lifetime are somehow different from one another. For however long we linger in this instant, it is ephemeral, it comes and goes like clouds that form and change and pass in time. For a moment the perception remains; but the thing perceived is gone. At last, perception itself is lost.

Incandescent in one image, subtle in the next, but in every case Yates has photographed what is seemingly ordinary, and made of it something extraordinary. In this sense, her work is poetry, and each image is both transformed and transformative.

-Ibn Tamam

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